


The Courtship of Nika Boronina

by breadandchoc



Series: Courtship Universe [2]
Category: Hitman (2007)
Genre: Character Growth, F/M, denial is not just a river in egypt, world's worst courtship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-19 08:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4739507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breadandchoc/pseuds/breadandchoc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to “Ten steps for capturing a Hitman”. Pure movieverse, Nika/47. Despite the title, much less fluff this time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Courtship of Nika Boronina

**Author's Note:**

> I write not for blood, guts or glory, but for the romance and to be read.
> 
> So, O tiny fandom, let me know you few Nika/47 readers aren't completely dead yet by reviewing. Mature feedback especially appreciated.
> 
> Also, if the "for the romance" bit didn't warn you - this is pure movieverse. As in I have never played the games, and I have extrapolated a great deal about the background of 47's industry from what little the movie gave us.
> 
> This will be a three chapter fic. If it seems a little jerky, it's because I initially planned the story to be entirely from Nika's POV and done as a quick semi-fluffy one-shot. Obviously, I failed to achieve everything in that last sentence.
> 
> Thanks for all feedback.

Sometimes, Nika does something so naive and thoughtless and just fucking _stupid_ that he can't help but think, just for a moment: _this is never going to work. She isn't worth it._

Just for a moment.

/

The real problem here isn't Nika. The problem here is him.

47 knows this. He knows it and the Organisation knows it and the other agencies know it, and even the better freelancers with the right connections know it. And they know he knows it, and he knows they know he knows, and so on and on, in this infinite loop that always end up with the same point, flat as a fatal heartline:

He is the problem.

He let a witness live.

This is not so bad in itself. (Actually, no: it is jarringly unprofessional and he is (was) _never_ anything less perfectly professionally – this is very bad. But it gets worse.) That mistake is still salvageable. When it is found out, the Organisation even sends a man after Nika to clean up for him, as a form of apology and gift for their betrayal in St. Petersburg. If he had accepted it then, then all this would be over by now. The single mistake in his otherwise flawless career would remain secret; his life would remain starkly violent and wonderfully uncomplicated; and every other hitman alive today wouldn't be trying to take him down.

But.

That's not what happens. Despite how irrational he knew it was, that is not the future 47 chose to live in.

/

This is what happens:

He kills the agent sent.

He gives his mistake a place to hide.

He methodically retires all other agents or contractors sent in the aftermath.

He continues to carry out his assignments as competently and efficiently as if the Belicoff debacle never happened.

And yet he never retaliates against those who order the hits. 47 understands the line the separates personal attacks from administrative corrections, and he is professional enough to accept the latter as a right of his former Organisation. Only amateurs take these things personally – only amateurs are too blinded by revenge or lust or whatever weakness to refuse to realize that they've made a mistake and actually try to fight the people who are trying to correct it. And 47 wants to be very, very clear that despite his one (unbelievable) mistake, he is still a professional. He has not gone rogue or unstable or (too) irrational, he merely has a... side-project that does _not_ detract or distract him from his work. He is still the best killer alive, and to interfere with him would be deeply unwise.

If actions speak louder than words, then 47 is practically deafening on this last point.

Naturally, the whole thing confuses the Organisation. They keep sending more men, and he keeps tracking and sniping them down. As a courtesy, or perhaps because of the spectacular failure when they tried it the last time, they don't put any hits out on his head. 47 has an unspoken agreement with the Organisation, and it goes like this: they pretend not to notice when he occasionally hijacks their various resources, and he decides not to burn them to the ground for their betrayal in St. Petersburg. This would explain why Organisation prefers to keep all things related to their former agent as secret as possible. As a result, it takes nearly two months before word starts to get out. It takes nearly two months before the rumours start.

It starts at first as a joke. His particular industry is a dark and unique one, and not known for its sense of humour, but somehow, even with the characteristic of this business as a lone-wolf affair, the rumour spreads faster than even 47 anticipated. It has to do with a certain legendary hitman and his apparent blindspot for Russian whores – the details of the frankly unfunny joke doesn't matter.

What matters is that after a while, a few people get too interested and start dropping a few questions in unfortunate places. What matters is that soon the joke becomes a story, the story becomes a puzzle, the puzzle becomes an underground controversy, and then the few other nameless and very officially non-existent agencies in the industry finally starts paying attention. They send an order framed as a request to the Organisation, flat and direct: _seek confirmation – is this true?_

The Organisation confirms it.

It would take more effort than it is worth to find out the exact reactions of the other agencies, but 47 gathers enough to know that they are not pleased. They demand to know why the Organisation has done nothing about their former agent. They get pictures and a body count of the damage control attempts so far. They ask why the Organisation hasn't managed to at least track the witness down. They get more pictures and another list of body counts. They point out, acidly polite, that clearly the Organisation shouldn't have compromised such a talented agent and it is their responsibility to clean it up. This time, each agency gets pictures of men of _theirs_ that _they've_ betrayed in the past, and a sheet precisely tallying the resources the Organisation has lost in helping take them down.

It's all bluster and delay, really. In the end, 47 knows as well as them that this is a problem for them all. He even appreciates the theory behind it: random acts of mercy are bad for business and should be discouraged; Nika is a random act of mercy; therefore, she should be discouraged. Visibly. When you're in a business that demands unquestioning compliance and ruthless brutality from the killers you've trained, you can't afford to have one deviate from the standard and let him go untouched. He might become a symbol. Worse, he might become a _possibility_. The breathing proof of choice. 47 can almost hear the various agencies panicking at the very idea.

It takes a couple of weeks before the organisations decide on a solution, and by the time they contact him, 47 is ready. He has researched the few precedents before him – other hitmen who have had kept witnesses or even targets alive, or tried to retire, or went rogue, or any of a variety of mistakes. Aside from perhaps one, none of them survived past their first four months. And 47 is not even sure about that one lonely survivor: like him, he was from the Organisation, and the only evidence that he may have made it is that his file was wiped clean instead of made public an example like the rest – and that may just be because the Organisation prefers to pretend that mistakes by their agents don't exist. As far as 47 can tell, their offer is always the same. A rule of engagement that is simple and darkly ironic and suicidally in their favour.

47 is going to accept it.

" _Incoming message: do you accept?"_

"Yes."

The laptop hums softly as it receives and decodes the connection. 47 strips off his jacket and pulls off his tie while he waits. The shirt is ruined with faint but unmistakable blood spray: he bites back a sigh.

" _We have an offer,"_ the screen drones finally. " _Regarding the witness from the St. Petersburg."_

"I'm listening."

" _This situation is most irregular. However, we are sure all parties involved can come to a reasonable understanding."_

The cursor blinks. 47 says nothing.

" _There is an old common law rule called a year and a day. It states no one is criminally responsible for the killing of another if death occurs past a year and a day after cause of death. Are you familiar with this?"_

"Yes."

" _As even legal wrongs have time limits as to their consequences, so are we prepared to recognize the same. The witness is free to live if she lives past a year and day. In return, you will accept a universal hit on your head, and arrange for all our costs to be covered in the event of your deaths. Do you accept?"_

"Define the parameters."

He already knows them, but 47 is nothing but meticulous in his preparations.

" _Your position will be a purely defensive one."_ The text is a rapid blur across the screen. " _You will not retaliate or go on the offensive. You will not sabotage or hold any member of the major organisations hostage. You will not engage in blackmail. You will not cause us to incur more costs than is necessary in the defence of your position. You will ensure the witness remains silent as to what she has seen. You will not involve or invoke the direct help of any third parties. If any of these terms are breached, the period of a year and day restarts."_

There is a pause. Then, as if even electronically modified voices can sound reluctant, it adds, " _And if you receive any assignment offers from any of the agencies, you will not be prejudiced against them."_

Well. It appears his reputation precedes him. Even as they try to wipe him off, they want to make sure they still have his expertise for the particularly difficult missions – while they can.

"Accepted. But if any of the offers are traps, the period ends immediately and the witness is free to walk – and I will be _very_ displeased."

" _You have our assurance that we will not engage in such conduct."_

"In my experience," 47 says acerbically, "that means nothing."

The cursor blinks silently.

47 gives himself one last chance to change his mind. It would be the rational thing to do. It would be the professi—

"I accept the offer. The period started when I shot the first agent sent after the witness. That makes this the second month and third week of the rule."

" _That is not how—"_

"This," 47 repeats, "is now the second month and third week of the rule."

A brief pause. Then,

" _Accepted. We have an understanding."_

He ends the connection. And then 47 wonders for the thousandth time what the hell he is doing. Nika is going to be the death of him, and it may very well be literal.

As he stands under the punishing hot spray of the shower, 47 thinks that maybe it's time he paid her a visit. It would be the first time he's seen her since he left her at the train. He makes a note to pack extra tranquilizer darts.

/

(A note:

47 didn't actually mean to keep visiting. He just wanted to make sure she was aware that he was alive, so it would cut down on any delays of surprise if he had to relocate or retrieve her in the future. The reception had been explosive, to say the least. Apparently, Nika really did think he was dead. She was tiresomely vocal in her displeasure. But when he had been about to leave, she had followed him to the car and asked him when he was coming back. And she kept looking at him this way, defiant and uncertain and horribly vulnerable, and...

47 really wishes she would stop doing that. It just makes life difficult for him.

So, he didn't actually mean to keep visiting. This is important. Because it just goes to show that despite all appearances to the contrary, he definitely, _definitely_ didn't mean to start taking her with him on his trips.)

/

The first time he does it, there _is_ a legitimate reason. More or less.

The target has already survived two attempts by others, and has turned into one of those annoying recluses who never leave their home. Unfortunately, his home is also fortified with four sets of patrolling guards with Rottweiler's; has double-layered bulletproof reflective windows; a screening system of biometric security; two rooms of guards watching cameras. He also has an army of bodyguards who never leave his side.

Basically, your typical over-the-top target which would take 47 about a week or less to kill.

But he is also a target who lives in Greece.

Where Nika has never been.

Where she has once mentioned she would like to go.

And it is a relatively safe assignment; and there is a formal function that the target is hosting in his house which would allow the hit to be done in one night; and even if Nika was seen, it would only confuse and add to the false trails he has laid for her trackers; and...

For Christ's sake.

47 brings Nika along as _cover_ , on the very legitimate basis that it would be near impossible to get into the function as a single man. For the first day there, he leaves Nika to her own devices while he makes the necessary arrangements. When he finally returns, the sky is glowing bruise-blue and he's in need of a new suit jacket. The blood stain is invisible to the eye, but 47 knows it's there and anything less than perfection annoys him.

When he walks in, Nika is in the middle of reapplying her make-up. The steam in the bathroom coil lovingly around her long legs. She is remarkably topless.

"The door is there for a reason, Nika," he says pointedly. He drops the packages on a chair, then follows suit. He stares at the banquet before him.

"But then how will you pretend not to look?" she calls back. 47 ignores that.

"What's all this?"

"Your dinner." She comes out with slightly more clothes on. "I didn't know what you wanted."

_Oh. That's..._

"Thank you," he says. _Unexpected_.

Nika shrugs. "You don't have to look so surprised." She sits in the chair opposite him, draws her legs up.

"I went to the beach today," she informs him.

47 starts uncovering the dishes. "Did you."

"Yes." She rests her chin on her knees, smiles dreamily. "I've never been to a beach before..."

It amazes him how much Nika can talk sometimes. She is capable of continuing a conversation solely by herself, a feat which, for all his training and specific skills set, 47 is fairly sure he would be unable to do. It is not unpleasant though. He listens and eats and gives a few neutral answers where appropriate, and to his surprise, doesn't find himself privately drifting off to plan tomorrow night's events. He has time to do that later anyway. By the time he's finished, he can hear the evening crickets from the balcony and Nika has morphed into a sleepy, soft-spoken creature, so different from the defensive, edgy attitude of her daytime self.

47 packs up the remaining food and stands. "Why don't you sleep," he suggests. He offers her his hand.

Nika takes it and pulls herself up, but doesn't let go. She looks up at him. "You know, I used to dream about this," she says quietly. "When I was with Belicoff."

He really wishes she would stop looking at him this way. "You're only here as a cover," 47 says, half to himself. He doesn't touch her gently, just there, on the cheek as he speaks. He is very careful not to.

Nika's smile is like a wound. "I know. But it's still true."

She lets go of his hand and goes to bed.

It takes a distractingly long time before he can focus on his work again. It is almost inefficient. But when the next night arrives, Nika fulfils her role suitably well and the hit is carried out, swiftly and neatly, and they are out of the mansion grounds just as the alarm is raised. That alone saves him nearly a week, so really, the end result is actually _more_ efficient.

47 is a great believer in the ends justifying the means. Some might say he is a living testament to many other people's similar convictions.

That is why he continues to bring Nika along on assignments which would be assisted by either a female companion or distraction in some way. Because it's merely practical. Because she is merely a means.

/

It surprises him at first that Nika doesn't attempt to pull any of the absurd stunts she was constantly trying during their time in Moscow. After a couple of months, 47 stops anticipating it warily and starts to develop a routine of sorts – though not a _predictable_ routine, because he of all people knows the danger of that. It works out to something like this: he sees Nika; he accepts and carries out certain assignments; at the same time, he tracks the men after Nika and retires the ones that come too close; at the same time, he takes counter-tracks and takes technically-defensive steps to deal with the men after him; at the same time, he sets up or continues to develop the enticingly plausible trails that promise to eventually lead to Nika in the same way a rainbow leads to a pot of gold; at the same time, he quietly gathers intel on the mood and plans of the various agencies. And then he checks on Nika again. It works out to an average of twice a month, or so. It is a busy life.

It isn't so bad at the beginning. Despite their proclaimed commitment, the other organisations are reluctant to waste resources on what they regard as the Organisation's problem, and the Organisation is reluctant to add to their growing headcount of failures. This leaves mainly the freelancers, who generally range between amateurs and very good amateurs. By contrast, the freelancers who are good enough to be agency-trained tend to leave him alone. 47 has the impression that most of them are watching him in the same way an audience watches a mass ring-match: they aren't going to help him if he goes down, but they aren't going to bring him down either. Considering the snowballing price on Nika's head, this is as good as having a fanbase.

Now with six months (and a day) left to go to the dateline, 47 is starting to notice a change in the intensity and proficiency of the attacks. He has already survived longer than any of the past men who have taken the agencies up on their offer. The various organisations have started to – not worry, but grow... _concerned._ Their men keep turning up in neat piles. None of the terms of agreement have been broken. 47 is careful to maintain a constant and sufficiently challenging schedule of assignments, and he still carries them out more efficiently than most other hitmen. And the freelancers, who usually work as an effective mass weapon of distraction, are getting increasingly reluctant to seek out the 'ghost's whore', let alone the ghost himself.

47 knows that very soon, the real storm will start. He is already surviving on an average of six hour of sleep daily, which is still manageable. He estimates that by the time it is three months to the ending date, this luxury will cut down to three to four hours a day. If all goes well, his preparations of the last seven months will ensure everything goes as planned. All he has to do is remain focused, execute the plans, and not get distracted.

It is around this time that Nika decides to start kissing him.

/

Really, he should have seen it coming. Nika may have been unusually subdued the first few times he saw her, but he has returned often enough that she no longer looks at him like it's the last time she's going to see him whenever he leaves. This is probably a bad thing, but it's still better than trying to handle the quietly repressed version of Nika.

On the other hand, _this_ is what happens when he has to handle Nika in her full impulsive self.

_Goddamnit, Nika._

47 stares at the woman in his arms. Even when unconscious, a hint of a smirk remains on Nika's lips. She tasted like wine, rich and sweet. She –

Goddamnit.

He carries her to the bed and drops her there. Then 47 spends the rest of day trying to ignore the phantom press of lips against his. He tries not to think of the way her lips curved under his. He tries not to think at all.

/

The second time catches him by surprise again; but by the third, he is ready.

"Nika," he says, "you have to stop this."

He is calm. He is reasonable. Nika spits a curse and rubs her neck, complaining about how his heartless attack will leave marks and how HE is the one who has to stop it, you goddamned psychopath.

Until he met her, 47 has never met any woman who swears quite like Nika.

He has every intention of giving her a short, biting lecture on a what she is going to stop doing effective immediately, the top of that short list being attempting ( _failing_ ) to seduce him, but then Nika interrupts:

"I'm already wasting a whole goddamned afternoon doing this pointless exercise, the least you can do is hold still _and not fucking attack me_ when I'm just trying to kiss you!"

And that.

Is just.

_Unbelievable._

It had taken him ten minutes to even get Nika to _hold_ a gun properly. _Hold it._ And either Nika is deliberately aiming for everything _but_ the very large and perfectly unmoving target, or she has absolutely no hand-eye coordination and in 47's world, that's just not humanly possible. So if anyone is going to complain about having to spend an afternoon doing this _pointless_ exercise, _it had better be him._

"Perhaps," 47 says acidly, "we should continue this when you're actually concentrating."

Nika mutters an insult at him and predictably, throws her gun at him. She glares at him even more when he catches it, as if taking it as a personal affront, and then stalks off muttering under her breath. 47 wonders if he should have let the gun hit him. She really is impossible sometimes. He represses a sigh.

Then he follows the only living mistake of his life back to her house and watches her swing between sulkiness and wicked teasing for the rest of the evening. It isn't amusing at all. He tries not to smile.

/

Yes, yes. He knows. He could done more to stop her.

And yes. He should have.

But the thing is this: 47 has given up on trying to make sense of things around Nika. It's easier to just accept her as she is, as some form of private and very feminine natural disaster, than try to control her. Despite everything she's seen him do, Nika still has an aggravating tendency to just _not_ listen to him. It's as if she carefully weighs what he says to discern just how far she can push it, and then goes for it. What's annoying is how good she is at it. She has an appalling amount of trust in his patience sometimes.

He does draw a line when she tries it in public, though. It's distracting enough in the relative safety of private spaces; in public, such a distraction could be fatal. For once, Nika actually seems to listen and doesn't do it again.

47 wonders what it means that she ignored all his previous orders in other places. Then he stops wondering, because it turns out he'd really rather not know.

/

It was a risk, but after he takes on two particularly challenging assignments consecutively, surviving on seventy-two hour days for a week to get the jobs done, the price on Nika's head finally moves up over his. And then it spikes sharply; doubles; doubles again; and overnight, the price on his head is mysteriously wiped down to a token amount and the attempts on his life slow dramatically. The tracking efforts to find the witness named Nika Boronina, on the other hand, jumps exponentially.

This is excellent news.

47 knows how the agencies think. The real problem here isn't Nika. The real problem is him.

He knows it and the Organisation knows it and the other agencies know it, and so on and on, in this infinite loop that always end up with the same point, flat as a fatal heartline:

He is the problem.

He let a witness live.

Except... within that problem, there lies another one. Small and diamond-hard and carefully crafted. And that inner problem is this: 47 is very, very good at what he does. In fact, he is unprecedentedly good. No hitman has ever managed to survive an all-out industry hit on his head for as long as eight months, _and_ keep a target alive and miraculously hidden, _and_ maintain an undisrupted professional life, as if unaffected by the private war waged on him by the major players of the killing industry. He is good enough, in fact, that he has become too valuable to retire.

47 knows that agencies, even his former Organisation, are unofficially (deeply) interested in recruiting (or re-recruiting) him as a resource. They would prefer that he gets cured of his weakness by a dose of death to the witness, as opposed to death to him. Not that they would be opposed to his retirement, of course, but... The focus is on the symptom named Nika Boronina now. And that goes perfectly to plan. It is far easier to protect Nika without constantly counter-tracking and taking down those after him too. The main issue now would be to keep Nika hidden, and make sure she doesn't do anything foolish to attract attention.

Also, getting some sleep would be nice. 47 is exhausted enough that he has been moving on numbed routine for the past few days, which can be deadly in a life where split-second reactions is the difference between breathing and the lack thereof. He is tired enough that it takes a while for him to realize that he is going through the motions that is a prelude to seeing Nika – the double-weaving and back-tracking and false clues and the acceptance of a simple cover assignment – all the things that allow him to see Nika without getting her killed in the process. It is dangerous and irrational and he should really, really be sleeping instead of going through with this idiocy, but it has also been nearly three weeks since he last saw her, and she always looks at him in that way he hates when he stays away for too long. Besides, he can rest on the flight there. He can handle this.

When 47 finally arrives at the vineyard, it's three in the afternoon for Nika and three in the morning for him. He finds her in one of the smaller plots, testing the soil with a look of concentration on her face. Even with her knees in the dirt, she's still dressed in an impractical dress of some sort, one thin shoulder strap falling over her shoulder.

He comes up behind her and touches her there lightly. Predictably, Nika starts. It's exasperating how easy it is to surprise her sometimes.

Nika turns; her face lights up. "Well _finally,_ " she says, but she's smiling. She gets up and moves towards him; 47 takes a step back automatically. Nika stops obligingly.

"How long are you staying this time?"

"Just a few hours."

"Can you stay the night?" she asks hopefully.

She always asks this, even though his answer never changes. "No. Why do you even bother to ask?"

"Why don't you ever say yes?" she snipes back. 47 hopes she isn't going to start sulking. He really doesn't have the energy to deal with that.

But Nika merely looks resentful for a moment before the light returns to her eyes again. "Fine, don't. Come on, I want to show you something."

He follows her as she leads him out of the vineyard and into hilly terrain. 47 can feel himself slowly degrading into the unique mode he occasionally reverts to when the exhaustion or stress of a fight becomes too much. It's a mode which strips everything away but the core of him, leaving him deadly and crystal-sharp and perfectly, viciously detached – it's not something that Nika should meet. 47 is trying to fight the weight of weariness when he realizes that Nika has stopped.

She has brought him to a natural sniper's nest. They are on the rise of a hill, with good bush cover; and fields of green and rust-gold spread out before them. Their position is low enough that a normal scope would be sufficient for a headshot; but high enough that any approaching enemies would be spotted at a decent range. Knowing Nika, she probably just saw the view.

He joins Nika in sitting near the edge of the rise overlooking the terrain. She shifts closer and leans her head against him; 47 is too tired to move.

"I found it when I was exploring this area a couple of weeks ago," she says softly. "I like to come here sometimes, to think. It's so peaceful. Or sometimes I just come and watch the people below work. You know, they never look up?"

"People rarely do."

"Mm. I guess you don't expect anyone to be watching from above."

"I often count on it."

"Ha, with a _gun_."

"With a delivery," he corrects.

"Delivery." There is a tease in her voice. "How polite."

"I try."

He feels her smiling. 47 concentrates on staying awake. There is gentle breeze, and there is a sleepy hush settling around them, and...

He shakes himself mentally. This isn't working.

"Nika, I need you to keep watch."

She lifts her head, looks confused. "Keep what?"

"I'm going to rest for a few minutes," he translates patiently. "I need you to stay alert and wake me if you hear anything."

"Why, who are you expecting?"

"No one. But I won't be able to rest unless you do."

Nika looks amused. "Alright. If you insist on being paranoid. No, I will," she adds hastily, when he makes a quiet, irritated sound, "Really, I will. Trust me."

 _Says the woman who never hears me coming_ , 47 thinks. But really, if anyone finds Nika now, they deserve to.

He leans back on his elbows; then raises himself again and takes off his jacket. He hands it to Nika wordlessly. She takes it without any sign of abashment.

"I _like_ the way I dress," she retorts to his pointed look. One day he'll just let her shiver till she gives in and gets clothes that are practical enough to actually keep warm in.

47 lies back on the grass and covers his eyes with his arm. The darkness is a blessing. And Nika is safe and unharmed and next to him. He can afford to just... take a few...

When he wakes, the shadows have grown deeper and the sun has moved across the sky. 47 blinks, raises himself up slowly. There is a grateful restfulness in his muscles. He estimates he's slept for about two to three hours.

Nika smiles at him. "Welcome back. You survived."

His voice comes out sleep-rough. "I survived?"

"The horde of angry attackers." She smirks. "But then they saw me watching, and they surrendered on the spot. Because I'm that good."

"Clearly," 47 says dryly. "Why didn't you wake me?"

"For the horde?"

He gives her a look. She relents.

"Because you looked like you needed it. And you always wake up if you need to, and you didn't this time, so..."

She shrugs. The movement gets lost in his jacket, spread too big around her shoulders. In it, Nika looks small and fragile, like a girl lost. It makes a striking contrast with her knowing dark beauty, as if she can be two personalities at once. 47 has never once wondered why Belicoff had kept her for so long, even though the man was known for his fickleness. Not once.

The remnants of sleep are still low and drowsy in his head. So that may be why 47 allows himself to reach out. That may be why he is allowing himself to touch her now, precise and careful – just his thumb brushing her tattoo; just his palm cupping the side of her face. Practically means nothing at all. Nika stills, then she puts a hand over his, presses it warm and close. In her eyes, there is that terribly vulnerable wonder again.

Nothing at all.

He keeps his voice calm, as if his weakness wasn't a tangible thing between them. "You must not have moved much, for me not to wake."

"I've had practice." She sounds dazed. "I know a lot about not wanting to wake sleeping men."

"I see."

"Not that I didn't want to – I mean, not that I was afraid that – I didn't mean you're like the other..."

Her words stumble to a halt. Nika looks briefly miserable. Then she says, as if stating the simplest fact in the world, "I just want to be with you, that's all. I didn't mind."

Sometimes Nika has sulking tantrums and is irritatingly unreasonable with her cajoling demands that he stay longer, that he talks, that he tells her things that he sees no need for her to know. Then there are times when she does something like this: not move for hours so he can sleep, even though she knows he'll have to leave soon after. There are times when she blindsides him with a strike of quiet, sudden honesty, and he has no defences.

It's an unfair advantage. He was never trained for this.

47 pulls back, gets up. Nika looks up at him, anxious and uncertain. The light is fading, but he estimates there is still about an hour before it gets too dark to see.

Nika takes his offered hand and pulls herself up. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. You're going to practice."

"Practice what?" Then she realizes. "Oh for fuck's sake. Not again. I _hate_ that goddamned tree..."

She complains the whole way down the hill and to the field. 47 takes the time to get a grip on himself again. By the time they reach the spot, Nika has gotten impressively creative with her vocabulary. Anyone would think she suffered more than him in these trying lessons.

It's easy to keep Nika distracted. 47 thinks, as he watches her miss the target yet again (bad grip, and she _still_ flinches when she pulls the trigger), that he can't do this. Not yet. Not now. He'll deal with one problem at a time. Right now he has to focus on keeping her alive, not to mention himself. And then, perhaps... once it's over...

Nika breaks his thoughts by throwing her gun to the ground. And then she breaks his irritation by startling him into another ambush, using his tie as leverage. At least she appears better at basic trickery than aiming. She smirks a lot more and concentrates a lot better after that, but she still misses spectacularly. 47 is too distracted to really care.

/

No.

He does want not to talk about that night.

First, because it shouldn't have happened. He can't afford to lose focus like that again. The worst so-called professionals are always the ones who have attachments while they work.

Second, very soon after that, 47 doesn't have much time to dwell on it. It's the ninth month, and there are only three months and a day left to go. On some days, he can't tell if its dawn or eventide. On most days, he doesn't have time to care.

/

The agencies start to devote an impressive amount of resources to finding Nika. They send men after him too, of course, but their efforts have more the quality of distraction than anything else, so that for periods of days, 47 doesn't have time to do anything by counter-ambush and counter-track and gather or force out intel that will keep him alive. It's a simple but unfortunately, effective method. He still has to keep up a schedule of assignments, track the many freelancers and agents after Nika, create false diversions, take down the ones that come too close, and very importantly, _sleep_. 47 has never been so tired in his life. And there are still so many weeks to go.

He takes Nika with him a couple more trips. Not so much as cover but – as a form of bait. He would give her a list of places she can go in the new city and leave her while he conducts his affairs. Her picture will be captured by security cameras and two days later, recognized by the agencies' bio-scanning devices. Then the sharks will smell blood in the water and come in a frenzy only to find him waiting. Technically, 47 is not allowed to go on the offensive; but he prefers to arrange the circumstances of his technically-defensive position. If he controls the leak of information well enough, he can draw out the men who he has marked as needing retirement.

Also, there is something... else. There is no evidence or reason to believe that any of her trackers are close enough to finding her that he has to pull her out of vineyard, but...

It's an instinct. And 47 has survived long enough in this business that he has learnt not to ignore them.

It is the same instinct that calls him back early from a task one evening. He has left Nika to her own devices as usual, but for once, she isn't back before him. He has just finished an eight-hour stake-out, and had planned to enjoy five-second dozes in a quick shower before heading out again to set up technically-defensive traps and ambush a potential contact. Except when he checks Nika's location, he finds her walking into a death trap. There is an instant where the world freezes, then 47 is a blur of movement – out of the hotel, through the maze of streets, down to the docks where there are far too many eyes that belong to one of the agencies. Where Nika is. When he finds her, he is so relieved and furious that he barely knows what he says. He takes her back and is forced to skip the shower, but the adrenaline shock keeps him alert for the rest of the night anyway.

After that, 47 decides against bringing Nika along. He doesn't have time anyway. It doesn't take long before his exhaustion starts to shave away everything but the core of him: trained killer, clinical and blindingly focused. All the matters is reaching the objective; the reasons behind it are irrelevant.

After a few weeks, 47 is down to surviving on this core mode almost constantly.

After a month more, he can't remember how else to be.

/

He gets a message from the agencies one month before the dateline.

The man before him is from one of the agencies that mark their agents with a code on the right side of their necks. Right now, that mark is obscured by the blood spilling from the slit in the man's throat.

47 shushes the gasping man soothingly, and aims the gun at his forehead.

"Wait." It comes out more as a gurgle than a word. Red life trickles from the corner of the agent's mouth. He rasps, "I have a message."

47 pauses. He doesn't move the gun. "Speak."

"An offer. If you-" The man chokes. More blood spittle. 47 waits impatiently. At this rate, he wouldn't need a bullet.

"If you eliminate the witness yourself," the agent manages finally, "your hit will be lifted. Your mistake wiped. Everything returns to before."

"Before," 47 says flatly. "Really."

The man is weakening rapidly. "Unofficial," he rasps wetly, "but my agency – has a position – for you. With full access – to all inter - intermediate intel."

Full access. Despite himself, 47 is surprised. "Anything else?"

The agent glares at him. 47 supposes he could wait for him to die. It would only take a few minutes more. But he doesn't have that much time to waste. So he retires the agent neatly and leaves his body with the other corpses. When he emerges from the alley, it is the lunch rush and no one looks twice at the shaven-head man in the business suit.

Full access. How... flattering. Back when he was under the Organisation, he'd always wanted – Anyway, it's a good sign. They're getting desperate.

Four weeks.

And then the witness Nika Boronina will be in the clear.

And then he can sleep for a full night instead of three-hour snatches in unsecure places.

And then it will all be over.

He can do this. He will do this.

47 has a faint feeling that he is forgetting something – not crucial to the objective, but...

It doesn't matter.

Four weeks.

He can do this.

/

A week later, the signal of Nika's trace dies out. There is a moment of blank shock – then 47 remembers why. And then he remembers what it is that had nagged at him yesterday: the visits. Of course. He hasn't had time.

He is tempted not to bother to go back anyway. There are only three weeks and a day left after all, and the trace on her is such a small detail of precaution... But even as he thinks that, 47 knows he's going to go. Details are what makes the difference between perfection and near-perfection; and in this business, it translates into the difference between life and death. And he hasn't come this far to leave anything to chance.

When he arrives, Nika sees him coming and goes to him. She demands to know where he's been; he deflects . She becomes theatrical and announces he is leaving her; he is short in his answer. Though even as he says it, 47 thinks that he might very well be leaving her at this rate: if someone was to attack him right now, he would be too tired to fight properly. The realization shakes him a little. It prompts him to accept the ever-present invitation to stay the night for once. Over dinner, Nika is subdued and agitated. It turns out that after all her show of asking in the past, she's actually uneasy with him staying. 47 doesn't really care. He doesn't. He just wants to sleep.

He sleeps till just before dawn. Then he wakes and goes to Nika's bedroom. She doesn't stir, even when he carefully draws the covers back and places the signal charger close to her neck, near the back of her ear. The charger locates the device and clicks three times, beeps. Nika's breathing doesn't even change. She really is a depressingly easy mark. 47 watches her sleep for a moment, then shakes himself. Despite his rest, he can still feel a heavy weariness deep in his bones, as if the hours were merely blinked away. He takes a breath. And then he leaves to fight for a new day.

The week passes bloodily.

Two weeks and a day left.

Another week passes, heavy with sulphur and smoke.

One week and a day.

One week.

Six days.

_Five._

Then –

It happens.

Five days before it's all over, everything changes.

First, Nika gets found.

/

It is a chance thing that tips 47 off. Something a contact mentions in passing, an afterthought of an afterthought, hardly worth noticing. But 47 has been trained to notice every minor detail for so long that it might as well have been a shout. In the interrogation, the contact blabbers about the usual things: how everyone in the his network from Cairo to Stavropol is being hit for info about that Boronina bitch, not just him, oh god please stop, he doesn't know anything more etc etc. Except Stavropol is one of the largest regions of Russian wines, and even though Nika isn't located there, it is a close enough hit that it prompts 47 to question him further. It turns out that despite all the trails 47 has carefully laid that insist otherwise, there's an unknown who has been particularly interested in the rural wine-making regions of Russia. 47 doesn't bother with the camouflaging actions in getting to Nika this time: there is no time, and she is as good as compromised anyway. At the airport, he only hesitates briefly before he gets two tickets: at this stage, the safest option would be to take her with him. It's dangerous, but he doesn't have time to relocate her right now. He gets an extra return ticket anyway as an unlikely back-up plan, then spends the flight there reworking the change in his plans. And eighteen hours after he first hears the tip-off, 47 is in Nika's bedroom telling her they have to go.

(Notice that so far, this is merely a change of plans.)

(Notice that when a man like 47 uses a word like _everything_ , he rarely exaggerates – and so far, this hardly changes everything.)

Everything changes, but not because Nika gets found. Not exactly. There are few truths in the world that 47 believes in, but when he does, he builds his world around them, absorbing them to be as undeniable as fact.

Such as: he is going to die violently one day, and he is going to die alone.

Such as: he will never be as good at doing anything else as he is at taking lives.

And recently, such as: Nika will never fully listen to him, and she will always wait.

This is how everything changes:

In the car, on the way to the airport. 47 is drained enough that he doesn't care to ask what it is that's bothering the woman beside him. Nika is nervously subdued beside him again, and he can tell she's trying to work up the courage to say something. He wishes she'll just say it. It's distracting him from planning the schedule of the next few days ahead.

And then Nika does say it, and he stops planning altogether.

She thanks him for giving her the vineyard.

She rambles on some more about how grateful she is, how she has everything she wants now.

Then she tells him this is the last time she'll be seeing him.

Then she tells him that she'll never forget him.

And the whole time she says this, she doesn't even look at him. Just straight ahead, clear and tense.

He actually asks her to repeat. That's how unbelievable it is. She's sharper and more brittle the second time, but the message is the same:

Nika wants him to stop visiting.

She wants him to leave.

And.

She is right, 47 thinks. He always knew it had to end sometime. Just not this way.

And.

This is actually a good thing. Because no matter how well he's done so far in this game, no matter how perfect his kills or precisely met his datelines in other assignments, Nika will always remain an unprofessional aberration...

And.

He only continued visiting her before for her sake, and now that he's freed of this obligation, he... She is a continuing mistake, and this is a chance to...

47 is so tired. That's why he can't think right now, why his head hurts; he needs to rest. Nika doesn't say anything for the rest of the drive, and pretends to sleep on the whole flight to their destination. She always was thoughtless as to planning, 47 thinks distantly. If she was going to say this, she should have said it at the end of the trip, not at the start.

Not that it matters, since he doesn't care either way.

This is probably why they teach trust as one of the worst flaws to have, back in the Organisation. Right after the flaw of mercy.

He has been such a fool.

By the time they get to the right hotel, 47 has deliberately shut down to his simpler mode, where everything is clearer and sharper and stripped of sentiment. Where everything is easier to deal with. He is arranging for the right room to book when there is a collective gasp around the room and all eyes are on the person behind him. Nika, of course.

Who has just caused a scene by swearing at a bellboy.

Who he has specifically told to keep a low profile.

Who has just made his work several times more complicated by drawing attention to herself.

Sometimes, Nika does something so naive and thoughtless and just fucking _stupid_ that he can't help but think, just for a moment: _this is never going to work. She isn't worth it._

Just before he turns to deal with the matter, 47 thinks of two things.

The first is a flash-memory of Nika, sitting on a hill rise with his jacket loose around her, quiet and darkly exquisite and achingly untouchable.

The second is of an offer made in an alley by a dying man, stark and uncomplicated in terms. A way back to his old life.

As he turns, 47 reminds himself that the problem isn't Nika. The problem is him.

Of course, where the solution lies is also ultimately up to him.


	2. A Comedy of Errors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, fun fact! The common law "year & a day rule" does exist and is still in force in several jurisdictions.
> 
> Sorry for any weird pacing in this chapter – this was the original 'one shot' the story was meant to be and serious modifications butchered parts of it.
> 
> As always, thanks for all feedback.

/

Sometimes, even though it's been nearly a year since that cocksucker Belicoff was shot, Nika still gets mistaken as a whore on the streets.

This doesn't happen back home, where the neighbours all know each other by name, face and even goddamned birthday, and visitors are rare phenomena that happen maybe once a year, but whenever 47 takes her to a new city in some country she's never been in before, the odds are, Nika is going to get mistaken as a whore.

_What's your price?_ the man leers at her, or at least she thinks that's what he's asking – she's seen that same look before and the question is always the same.

Nika returns the mocking smirk, flips the sonofabitch the universal gesture for _fuck off_ , and strolls on pass him without breaking her stride. When she returns to the hotel at the end of the day, 47 still isn't back and so she entertains herself by experimenting with the new make-up she bought.

She always returns to her usual look, but it's still worth trying.

/

Okay, so this is how Nika saw it happening:

She kisses 47; he stops resisting; they live – not happily ever after, because even her daydreams aren't _completely_ absurd – but they live _,_ and they live in a form of together. Sure, it'll probably be the kind of together that probably has more absences than actual presence, more silences than actual conversations, but _still_. Together. That kind that says he doesn't mind her being difficult sometimes. That assures her that he will always come back to her, even though that silent bastard never tells her where he's going or when or for how long. That – and is the important bit – that he would want to. That he would want her.

This is what really happens:

47 kisses her, in the cloaking darkness of a hotel room in some obscure backwater country – and nothing else changes. In the morning after it happens, she wakes and finds him already dressed and planning his next assignment at the table. Everything looks so jarringly ordinary and unremarkable that Nika doesn't dare act like it's any other day, like last night didn't happen – and nothing else changes. When he drops her off at the airport, he treats her the same as ever, calm and indifferently tolerant, and by the time Nika has shaken off her confusion to find her words, he's already driven off – and nothing else changes.

And now, four weeks and two days since that night in the hotel (so she's been counting, _so what_ ), they still haven't talked about it and still _nothing fucking changes._

No, actually, something _has_ changed: Nika hasn't kissed him since. It's cowardly, she knows. But what if he shakes her off again; or worse, what if he sits her down, gives her that _look_ , and explains to her that no, it meant nothing; really Nika, what did you expect?

Okay, so that latter scenario is a little far-fetched – Nika can't imagine 47 sitting down to actually have a heart-to-heart with her like that – but he might still give her that flat, unimpressed look that pretty much says it all. And if that's the reality of it, then Nika doesn't want to face it just yet. When he does see her, 47 seems to spend most of the time looking through her, as if already distracted by something better, and Nika sometimes wonders whether she just dreamt it all. If she just wanted it so much she could imagine it into a false memory.

It would help if they actually talked about it.

...Of course, it would also help if there was world peace, but Nika doesn't waste dwelling on impossibilities and so she mostly focuses on trying to remember every detail of that night, polishing and polishing the memory until it is solid and warm. It is a small stone of hope she holds on to when he leaves her without a word for weeks, or when he says something particularly harsh or indifferent, something the bastard tends to do more often these days; or basically, in any other times when Nika wonders whether this is going to lead anywhere at all. Whether 47 thinks that night in the hotel was a mistake.

Because believe her, Nika does wonder. All the time.

/

There are two sides the 47: when he is thinking about an assignment, and when he is not thinking an assignment.

The girls like to hear about that not-thinking-about-assignment side. Nika doesn't tell them about the alternative. She doesn't want to ruin their illusions.

"So tell us about how you got your own place," Roza says. The other girls huddled nearby look at her with idle interest. There is faint drizzle spoiling the night tonight, and the tricks are slow to come out. Nika is standing under an abandoned shop's overhang with the rest of the girls, shivering and keeping close to Roza for warmth.

"Again?" Nika complains, but her heart isn't really in it. "Didn't I just tell that like two weeks ago?"

Roza rolls her eyes. "Honey, you got anything better to share?"

"No," she mutters. 47 still hasn't visited her this month, the bastard.

"Well then." They all look at her expectantly.

It's probably sad or ironic or something, but it turns out the only people that Nika can be comfortable and herself around with is a killer and a bunch of whores. So these are her friends, or close to it – they are friendly and banter with her easily enough, but she knows they don't think of her as one of them. That's alright – Nika doesn't want to be. She is careful to only come see them every couple weeks or so, as if her past life can be kept at bay by both actual and metaphorical distance. She got out of this business with the unexpected kindness of a dark-eyed miracle, and there's no way in hell that she's ever going back. Even if the business seems to find her no matter where she goes.

It is the girls who find her more than she finds them, really. She had gone into the nearest town in a futile effort to convince herself that aside from her vineyard, her life _isn't_ just one long waiting game for a man who never stays more than a handful of hours. It had taken her one goddamned hour by what must be the shakiest, loudest bus in Russia, and when she'd finally arrived, the sky was already darkening. Nika had wandered the small town, feeling disheartened and lonely. It hadn't taken much longer before she found herself in the district that every town had, and found three menacing and determined-looking whores approaching her.

_Listen, new girl_ , Roza had greeted her. _This corner is taken. Unless you're looking to get into a tochka, you gotta find another place, you hear?"_

Nika had bristled at that. _I'm retired_ , she'd snapped.

_Uh-huh,_ said another woman sceptically. _Sure you are honey. Then why do you still walk like you're the best sex on high heels?"_

_"Not that I wouldn't if I could do that,"_ the third girl had piped in. She had looked seventeen, which meant that she must have been fourteen. Nika hasn't seen her since.

_Habit_ , Nika had shrugged, ready to walk off. Then she remembered that she has no real place to go, and they were the first people in weeks outside her field workers and old Alexei who had spoken to her without laughing behind her back. It had been depressing enough that she'd suggested, _I can show you_ , just to have some company. And that had been her first step into integrating herself with this new crowd.

They like her at first because she shows them tips to hook tricks and because cars always slow down whenever she stands in the corner with them. Then they like her even more when they find out that she's one of the lucky ones – that is, one of those ex-whores who managed to hook a trick for life to make a living as a mistress instead. They like to ask her for stories in the same way children ask for fairy tales at night. Nika tries to translate her new life into terms they can understand: a man who gave her a place of her own who doesn't own her; the freedom to come and go as she pleases and not get beaten for it. She doesn't bother trying to explain that he doesn't actually fuck her – well, except that one-time _mistake:_ they'll just think she's making it up.

Roza is the only one who actually listens beyond the stories. After Nika finishes her pretty tale of the magic white envelope and the girls around them have drifted off in their private worlds of what-ifs, Roza nudges her with her shoulder.

"So how's the happy ending going?" she asks quietly.

Nika shrugs. "More ending than happy."

The older woman flashes her a quick grin. "Prince Charming not lasting too long in bed? Always preferred it that way, myself."

"No, not that." Nika hesitates. "He's been busy lately, that's all," she says lamely. She knows what it translates into, in their trade: _He's losing interest, that's all._

That's all.

"Huh," Roza says. The rain patters down heavier for a moment; they huddle closer instinctively. "Well, don't fuck it up."

Easier said than done, Nika thinks. She fucks things up without even trying.

/

Some weeks after that night in the hotel, Nika gets lost in yet another city where they seem to speak every language except English and Russian. 47 tends to use her as cover in cities where the locals match her colouring, so as for her to slip under the radar better; unfortunately, he also tends to bring her to cities where she has no fucking clue how to communicate. Even the maps are incomprehensible – by the time she realizes that the place she _thought she was at_ when she made that crucial left-turn was not actually the place she _really was at_ , it is too late to try to retrace her steps. The good news is, she recognizes the name of the street she is currently on.

The bad news is, this is because the street name is on the list that 47 had left on the hotel table that morning, with the title being: AVOID THESE PLACES.

It is really getting quite dark.

Nika has just decided to try to ask another one of local passer-bys, one that preferably didn't simply scowl at her, mutter unintelligibly and walk off before she can ask him to please fucking repeat, when a shadow looms before her and grabs her by the arm. It drags her to a side-street before she can even so much as yelp for help.

"Do you deliberately try to be difficult, Nika?" It turns out the shadow is a very pissed off hitman. Nika shuts her mouth. "Or do you just have a death wish?"

Her relief is abruptly cut by her anger.

"Don't fucking talk to me like that," she snaps back, flaring up; "I've been wandering around this godforsaken city for three hours and I would have been back by now if one of these idiots here actually gave me directions that weren't _wrong_ and actually _understandable-_ "

"There is," 47 says bitingly, "an invention called a map—"

"I FOLLOWED the stupid map and it led me HERE. If you actually told me anything before you bring me- _ow you're hurting me!_ "

He lets go of her wrist. For a brief second, 47 looks uncertain; and then the moment passes and he is merely watching her steadily while she rubs her arm.

"If you intend to do something like this again," he says after a pause, "do it after the function tomorrow, when I no longer need you as a cover. It would set my plan back if I had to find another woman to replace you."

He turns away and walks off, clearly expecting her to follow. For a moment, Nika is so furious and so sickened that she nearly refuses out of spite. Then she remembers where she is and who he is, and follows.

There are faint streaks of dust on the back of his suit. Nika curses the man in her head the whole way back, and wonders how he found her in a city of a million others. She supposes it doesn't matter.

/

This is how 47 kisses: very gently, as if it is the one act he has never been taught to be violent at; very slowly, as if savouring the taste of wine for the first time. He is tender and even a little clumsy, like a young lover, and he kisses like he means it. He is nothing like what Nika imagined he would be like.

She relives the night in her mind a great deal, in the weeks after it happens. How he was so careful, as if he might break her. How he let her into his mouth so she could explore him in quick greedy licks; how she felt him lose the fight against himself and respond with the same hungry invasion. How his fingers curled around her hipbones, tentative and possessive; how his hands had slid breathlessly up the soft curve of her waist, hitching to a pause by the side of her breasts. How...

Nika remembers how much 47 had wanted her.

What worries Nika is that even in her own mind, she has come to think of that longing in past tense.

What really worries Nika is that lately, 47 is starting to visit her less and less frequently. She wonders if he is avoiding her.

/

Another time it had happened: in Berlin.

_What's your price?_ the man grins at her, and then actually repeats it in English. Just in case she didn't get the message the first time.

_Fuck you too_ , she answers sweetly. She would stalk off for dramatic effect, except 47 had told her to stay in this market square till noon and she hasn't finished shopping yet. She picks up a scarf at random and pointedly ignores the fucker.

_Come on, sweetheart_. The man actually has the balls to continue grinning at her. _I'm clean and I'll pay you good money, I haven't seen a girl like you before. How about it?_

_I'm retired_. She spins around and glares at him. _So fuck off._

The sonofabitch actually laughs. _You aren't retired. Anyone can see that. Ok, ok, I'll find you tonight when you're off your break. Which street do you usually walk?_

She gives him a random street she saw on the way the market square, gives him the most inconvenient hour she can think of without sounding suspicious, and tells him to be on time. She ends up having to buy the scarf for stretching it too much.

There is a howling thunderstorm that night. Nika watches it while waiting for 47 to get back, and hopes the fucker drowns. She falls asleep curled up in the chair by the window, but when she wakes in the middle of the night, she's on the bed, the sheets empty and cool beside her. She smiles to herself in the darkness and returns to sleep feeling a little less worthless than before.

(Of course, those were the days when 47 still preferred to sleep separately, and still had odd flashes of thoughtfulness. Nowadays he doesn't care where he sleeps either way, but he doesn't bother to move her either. Nika tries not to wonder if the trade-off was worth it. She tells herself it's too late for regrets anyway, then regrets thinking that at all.)

/

"It's not that he's cruel," Nika explains thickly. "He's just so – so fucking _efficient_. And I think he thinks I'm not efficient enough to fit in his life. Does that make sense?"

Roza frowns, passes her the bottle unsteadily. "No. Does this have to do with sex?"

"And the worst part is," Nika says with the dogged gravity of the determinedly drunk, "he's probably right. That bastard's _always_ right."

The whore looks at her. "Nika," she says. " _Don't_ fuck it up."

/

Nika can go on and on about the list of things she pretended not notice, that should have tipped her off that it was coming, but really, it comes down to this:

The way 47 stops talking to her.

No, she's in denial again; the truth is worse:

The way 47 stops _listening_. Half the time, even if he is physically in the same room as her, his mind isn't. Lately, he is colder, sharper, and he looks at her like she's just another object in the room. Lately, he barely looks at her at all.

Nika tries not to notice. She tries really, really hard. It's not something she's done for a long time, since whoring is a profession which demands an unflinching grasp of reality and consequences if you want to live past your first year, and up to nearly a year ago, Nika had never been anything but a whore since she was twelve. If she still lived in that world right now, she would be desperately crafting whatever image or personality her owner wanted her to be in order to keep his interest and by very direct implication, her life.

But despite what everyone seems to think, Nika is no longer in that business. And because she loves that cold bastard this stupidly much, she tries very, very hard not to notice.

Unfortunately, the rules of life haven't changed much since she was a child-whore. Ignoring reality still doesn't work. Often, it comes back to bite you in the ass.

/

She is so used to 47's visiting that it takes only a few days difference before she realizes he is late.

Technically, there is no set schedule – god forbid that he actually does something _she understands_ – but Nika sets her internal clock by the days between each visit, and the longest he has ever left her alone (except for directly after the whole Belicoff affair, when Nika wasn't even sure he was alive for nearly three goddamned months) is three weeks. Sure, his absences have been longer and longer these days, but it has already been three weeks and five days since his last visit. Nika forces her uneasiness down and reminds herself that 47 is the best at what he does, and so there's no need to worry – no, not even a bit.

Four weeks after his last visit, Nika is worried.

Four weeks and three day after his last visit, Nika is sure that 47 must have finally left her, that heartless fucking _coward_. She spends the whole day spit-cursing him; and then the rest of the evening forcing her heart from her throat. She spends the rest of the week mostly sleepless and terrified. She just wants him to come home.

Five weeks and one day after his last visit, 47 does.

Nika runs out to meet him and catches him at the edge of her second field. She doesn't know whether to hug or hit him – he is watching her warily, and she is sure he would deflect either as he usually does. So instead she does something stupider, because she needs a release for all the anger and terror and heartache of the past weeks – and for fuck's sake, because it would be a perfectly reasonable question if 47 was a normal man.

Nika asks – _demands_ to know where he has been.

47 shuts down instantly. He hates it when she asks him about his activities, Nika knows. He says instead, in a tone as blank as his face, "You won't be seeing me for some time."

She stares. "What?" she manages. "Why?"

He ignores that as well. "Or it may be possible that you won't see me again. In that case-"

"You're leaving me," Nika says numbly.

The man pauses. "No," he says. But Nika has had enough men lie to her in her life that she recognizes an untruth when she hears one.

They look at each other silently. Nika thinks she might be in shock. That would explain why she isn't crying.

"Do me a favour?" she says, when she is sure can speaking without her voice breaking down. "Bring me out one last time. I want to see another part of the world again before-"

- _you leave me_.

She can't say it.

47 sighs. He looks very tired suddenly. "I'll think about it," he says. "I'm very busy, Nika."

"Please," she says. She isn't begging. 47 looks at her and unexpectedly, raises a hand to press lightly against her cheek. It is the first time he has touched her like this in months. Nika is so startled she doesn't even lean into it until he pulls back again.

"I'll think about it," he repeats.

They are quiet as they head to the house. For once, 47 accepts her offer to stay the night. During dinner, he looks like he needs sleep more than food. He heads to the guest room without hesitation afterwards.

In the morning, though Nika gets up at dawn, she finds his door open and his bed empty. Somehow, it hurts more than she doesn't even feel surprised than the fact that he actually left.

/

As an act of defiance, Nika takes the bus into town. So that even if 47 came back, she wouldn't be there, and that would show that _bastard..._

Right. Nika still can't believe he left her. She just can't.

It's only mid-afternoon, but she goes to where Roza lives. Roza had scribbled her address on the back of her hand one night, and Nika isn't sure if that amounts to an open invitation but frankly, right now she doesn't care. She just needs someone to talk to and if Roza is pissed off enough to break up with her as well, then so be it.

The building is a squat, smudged thing along street of other squat, ugly buildings. There's no security to speak off, so Nika makes her way up the creaking stairs and goes down the corridor till she sees the right unit number. She knocks, waits, and then knocks again, louder this time. There is a muffled curse, a thump, and then the door swings violently open.

It's the first time she's seen Roza without her garish make-up on. The older woman glares blearily.

"The sun is still fucking up, so you better have-"

"He's leaving me," Nika says dully. The words feel thick and heavy on her tongue. It makes it sound like it's really happening.

Roza blinks. "Oh." She looks at Nika. "You better come in."

The place is pretty much one room with an adjoining bathroom without a door. There is a bed shoved in the corner, a half-open wardrobe, a small kitchenette and a full-length mirror, but other than that, there isn't much else. Roza sits heavily on the bed and gestures at Nika to follow suit.

"So," her host starts matter-of-factly. "You fucked it up. How?"

Nika draws her legs up, hugs them to herself. "Don't know. He just – I think it's because I got stupid."

"What do you mean?"

Nika closes her eyes. "You know," she says miserably. "I tried to get – feelings involved. My feelings. Fucking stupid, right?"

She hears Roza sigh. "Oh jeez. You can't be serious."

"And that's not all," Nika says, unable to stop. The words bubble out of her like a poison released, all the unhappy fears and gnawing insecurities of the past months seeping out like bad blood from a broken scab: "I'm difficult, I argue with him all the time, I always ask him to stay longer than he wants to. And I know he thinks I ask too much– except that's not fucking _fair,_ because all I just want-"

"All _you_ want? Nika, look at me."

She opens her eyes. The woman is staring at her like she's grown a second head.

"When has what you want ever mattered?" Roza says incredulously. "Nika, he's your _owner_. What the hell have you been doing?"

"He's not my owner," Nika snaps for the hundredth time, "He's-"

The slap rings out between them.

Amazement first; then the stinging pain swells and Nika curses, covers her cheek with her hand. She stares at the whore. Roza shakes her wrist.

"Honey," she says calmly. "Wake up. It's all very sweet that you've gone all soft on him but he bought you the moment he took you from the other man and let you live on that land of his. No one's free in this world, sweetcakes. And you sure as hell should have known it. So stop playing pretend and start cleaning your shit up."

The sad thing is, Roza is actually being kind. Her friend. Nika doesn't know whether to be grateful or despairing.

There is a wet heat in her eyes that is starting to match the burn of her cheek. Nika looks down, wipes her eyes surreptitiously.

"What should I do?" she mutters.

"You know what to do."

"Play the trick," Nika says drearily. "Be what he wants." She looks up. "I'm not sure if he's coming back."

"But he might?"

She hesitates. "I asked... He might. Maybe."

"Then you know what to do," Roza says simply.

Nika is quiet for a moment. "Thanks."

She means it.

Roza shrugs. "Hey, whatever." She watches Nika carefully while Nika collects herself, then gets up from the bed along with her.

At the open door, they look at each other. Roza leans her head against the door frame and looks at her. "You're not the only one who needs hope, you know," she says softly. Then she shoots Nika a shit-eating grin. "Come back with a story or not at all."

Nika tries a grin back. It doesn't quite fit. "Don't fuck it up," Nika agrees. She doesn't mention that it's probably too late.

/

It's depressing, but it doesn't take long for her to come to the conclusion that 47 would prefer her as the exact opposite of who she is.

She has seen him looking at her sometimes, this distant, focused look, as if trying to see past her into the future. Trying to see the problems she would bring.

Unfortunately, Nika can see it only all too clearly.

She sulks too much. She clings to him at times, teases him too often, and argues with him all the time, _especially_ if she knows he's right. She's maybe a little unreasonable sometimes and _fine_ , so maybe she doesn't always follow his instructions most of the time – but honestly, sometimes he's just so goddamned _paranoid_. And she knows she touches him too often, all the tiny random gestures of affections that Nika can't help and that 47 hates. He always tenses as if he's stopped himself from throwing her off just in time.

So.

Nika is going to be the exact opposite.

She's going to be pleasant; she's going to be agreeable. She's not going to sulk. She's going to show 47 that she's not only perfectly _fine_ with his leaving her; she's grateful for everything he's done and not upset _at all_ because Nika Boronina isn't needy or emotional or volatile, she's problem-free and _independent_ now (whatever the hell that means). And then 47 will change his mind and decide to give her a second chance, and all Nika will have to do then is be the professional she knows she was once, and not cry or punch the bastard in the throat.

It's a perfect a plan as she can come up with.

The only problem is that it all hinges on the hope that that cold fucker actually does come back.

Please come back.

/

He comes back.

He comes a little under three weeks later, and Nika is ready. She has practiced the right attitude and the right words and the right everything.

Her jaw hurts from all the goddamned practice smiles.

"Get your things," he says as soon as he finds her in the bedroom. He looks even wearier than he did the last time she saw him. Nika grabs her bag and follows him into the car downstairs.

47 passes her the flight tickets silently and starts up the car. As usual, he is ignoring her. Nika is pretty sure he is operating on just ingrained routine alone. He still drives absurdly well for a man who looks half-asleep, though.

Half-way through their four hour drive to the airport, she manages to gather enough nerve to speak.

"Listen," she says brightly, "I've never actually thanked you for everything you've done for me-"

"Forget it," he says shortly. Nika always suspected he appreciated that she never brought the topic up. It looks like she was right. Goddamnit. She forces herself to continue.

"Alright, but... I still want to say thank you. You've given me everything. You've given me reasons to live. And since this is probably the last time I'm seeing you, I just wanted to say I'll always be grateful."

She swallows her misery. And Nika says, pleasant and steady, "I'll never forget you."

47 doesn't say anything for a moment. The hum of the engine fills the car. Then,

"What?"

Nika resists the urge to curse. Fucking fantastic. The one day she needs him to pay attention to how very reasonable and non-needy she's being, and 47 looks exhausted enough that he probably shouldn't be driving, let alone concentrate on two things at once.

"I said I'll never forget you," Nika repeats, perhaps a bit too bright and hard. "You changed my life. Et fucki – et cetera. But I guess we both knew it had to end sometime."

She actually manages to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

She looks down at the tickets in her hands. There are two sets of tickets: two for the flight there, and, she sees with a sickening jolt, only one for the flight back. She supposes that he would tell her to head back by herself after he finishes his job and gets himself free of this last favour to her. Nika tells herself it is only logical, nothing personal.

(It's _all_ so goddamn personal to her)

She waits to see if 47 is going to say anything, maybe miraculously give in and commend her on her newfound maturity, but of course, he doesn't. His expression is so still that he might as well have not heard her at all. Nika is pretty sure that crying is something that Perfect New Nika wouldn't do, so she closes her eyes, rests her forehead against the cool windowpane. The tickets are a cold fact in her hand. He hadn't even doubted that he would change his mind.

The rest of the drive is a silent one. Nika tries to remember when their silences were comfortable rather than heavy, leaden things. It feels like a lifetime ago.

/

By the time they reach their hotel, Nika doesn't have the energy to put on the rabidly-pleasant act anymore. 47 hadn't spoken to her once during the whole six-hour flight there, and she had pre-empted his usual exasperated instruction to _Go to sleep, Nika_ by dutifully keeping quiet for once. Nika had spent most of the six hours reminding herself how terrible her life used to be and how fucking happy she should be right now. Goddamn him.

47 is negotiating the room he wants at the front desk. Nika has heard him do this before: a series of casual, easy-flowing questions that eventually identifies a room with a balcony that has an empty room adjacent to it. He always gets the room adjacent to the room-with-a-balcony, and then goes ahead and stays in the balcony-room when the bell boys leave anyway. Sometimes, he doesn't stay in either; just the one directly above or below the one he orders.

Apparently, tonight is one of those times.

He gets the room on the ninth level which, from what Nika can tell, has an empty balcony-attached room below it. The receptionist smiles at him, and he smiles back politely (goddamn him), and the bellboy comes to pick their stuff up. Just as he brushes past her, she sees that knowing half-grin, that familiar tug of his eyes undressing her...

"Fuck off," she snaps. She regrets it as soon as the words are out of her mouth.

The receptionists, guests and pretty much everyone standing within hearing range looks shocked. Only 47 looks displeased, but he recovers quickly.

"I'm sorry," he says, sounding appropriately embarrassed. "It's been a long day for us. And allow me."

The last bit is addressed to the bellboy. 47 takes the bags from him and steers her towards the elevators, like a concerned parent. Once the lift doors close, however, the act drops.

"I've told you not to draw attention to yourself," he says tightly. "Do you _never_ listen?"

"I'm sorry," Nika says meekly. _Sorry that I only get to tell them to fuck off after they actually tell me I'm still a whore_. But she knows better than to say that right now. She can't remember the last time she's seen 47 look so furious.

Her apology puts 47 off-guard, robs his anger of its target. He stares at her, his mouth a hard line, until the lift doors open. Nika shifts uneasily.

"Don't do it again," he says flatly. He walks out without looking back.

They are on the eighth floor. She was right about the room after all.

/

47 continues to be angry with her over the next few days. She wouldn't have realized, except she knows what 47 is like when he _isn't_ angry, and the difference is enough. He's a little more abrupt in his movements, a little harsher in his tone, but other than that, he's looks as dispassionate as ever. He does tell her that she can't go anywhere outside the hotel for the whole time they're there, and then looks at her as if waiting for her to erupt, but of course, she doesn't. It's not as if she's not used to it – Belicoff used to keep her trapped in apartments for weeks on end. In this case, four days is already far too short.

47 leaves her almost as soon as they check in, so she spends the next day swimming and day-dreaming by the hotel pool. It's nice to be in such clean, large spaces of water – it reminds her of that beach in Greece. She should ask him to take her to a country with nice beaches again one day, Nika thinks absently. Then she remembers how he probably doesn't plan to see her after this. Suddenly the pool room feels suffocating. Nika grabs her bathrobe, dries herself off furiously, and heads back.

When she reaches their room, 47 is back before her, for once. He puts his gun back down when he sees it's just her, then continues loosening his tie. His jacket is already crumpled in the bin, smelling strongly of engine oil.

There are black specks staining his shirt. He nods tersely at her. "Where have you been?"

Nika shrugs. "In the pool." She leans back against the door. "Wallowing in self-pity."

For a second, his lips quirk; then 47 simply looks tired and suppressed-angry again.

"You can shower first," he says, even though she hasn't said she was going to. Nika doesn't argue; she walks past him into the bathroom.

After her shower, Nika wipes the mist from the mirror and stares at the woman in it. With only the faintest smudges of her make-up, she looks younger and softer somehow.

"What are you going to be when you grow up, sweetheart?" she asks her younger self.

Her younger self simply looks sad. Nika takes a breath, and watches a flicker of determination cross the girl's face. Well. No point stalling...

When Nika leaves the bathroom, it is with less make-up and more clothing than she's ever worn since she was twelve. She walks with her head high and her eyes defiant. She only hopes that 47 doesn't notice how much she is trembling.

/

By the fourth day, Nika is ready to give up on trying to show 47 her new (fake) side. She wishes she would. It would make her life so much less painful.

She still isn't used to going about naked and bared to the world. Eyeliner, but no smouldering eye-shadow. A smooth transparent gloss for her lips instead of deep, sultry red or even camoflaging nudes. Slim dark jeans and simple, close-fit shirts. Nika has to resist the temptation to duck her head whenever someone glances at her. She hates it, but least no one is going to mistake her for a whore anymore. It is a small comfort.

If anyone else in the hotel notices the change in her look, no one comments on it. For most part, 47 leaves her to her own devices, and Nika has taken to wandering the hotel, driven by a mix of boredom and loneliness. 47 only comes back deep in the night or early mornings, smelling of blood or smoke or some other telltale scent of brutality. It would have been hard enough to try to convince him of the clean new goddamned sensible her, but it's fucking _impossible_ when he is not even there to begin with. He has never been this absent before, not in any of his past missions. She can't understand why he is so angry with her. If he didn't want to take her out for this last time than maybe he just fucking _shouldn't have_.

(No, no, she doesn't mean that. Despite it all, this is still better than nothing. How pathetic is that? Perhaps... perhaps he's just annoyed because he _doesn't_ like how she looks now. But there had been a moment when she stepped out of the bathroom, defiant and uncertain, that Nika thought he had. 47 had been slumped in a chair across the room, and he'd opened his eyes just as she walked out. Surprise; then before his calm-iron mask had dropped back down again, she thought she'd glimpsed a flash of something darker, hungrier. Which goes to show how desperate she's become because, goddamn him, the bastard treats her even colder than ever and Nika still doesn't know what else he wants her to be.)

Nika is just climbing the winding stairway that joins the ground floor to the first and second floor, and trying to imagine a life by herself when someone calls to her.

She looks up.

It is that bright-haired young man, a guest she's seen flirting with the receptionists. He's fairly good-looking, and has a nice laugh. He opened a door for her once, and flushed when she smiled at him. He grins at her now, rocking uncertainly on his heels on two steps above her. She is about to smirk back automatically when he says,

"So, how much?"

Nika feels the back of her throat dry up.

"What?"

He nods at her, still smiling anxiously. He's probably a good man, no girlfriend, assumes the best of most people he meets. And to her, he says,

"How much for a night? No, er, special needs or anything. Just the usual stuff."

Something inside Nika breaks.

"How much do you think I'm worth?"

He looks apprehensive. "Two hundred for a night?"

Crazy rich foreign fucker. Something of her surprise must have shown in her eyes because he says hopefully then, "So, do I go to front desk or-?"

"It's illegal here, you moron," she snaps.

"Oh, right, sorry." He looks like he is about to ask what she's doing here then, but then a new appreciative light darkens his eyes. "Two fifty," he says. "Straight-up."

So much for nothing special. For some reason, she always attracts the ones who like to be dominated, or worse, to dominate.

Nika is sick of this, suddenly. She just wants to get back to her room and curl up under the sheets. "Not here," she says. She's barely wearing any make-up. "Not tonight." She's even wearing practical clothes. "Meet me tomorrow at seven in front of the nearest park. Don't be late."

She moves past him even before he agrees. She can feel the weight of his eyes pressing up against her as she passes.

Nika hopes that it fucking _hails_ tomorrow. _Hard._

Then she has to stop again because another shadow is blocking her way. This time, when she looks up, a calm-eyed hitman is looking back down at her.

Her stomach drops. Nika is suddenly very aware of how clearly she can hear everything in the floor below.

"I wasn't-" she starts urgently, but 47 cuts her off:

"We're staying in the room opposite ours tonight. I've already moved everything."

He turns and starts moving up the stairs. Nika hesitates, then hastily follows.

"Alright," she says uncertainly. "But -"

"Stay alert," 47 continues, as if she hadn't spoken, "Something isn't right. I have a – task that only ends at midnight. Stay in the room till then."

All he cares about is his goddamned assignments. Nika tries for the last time, "Okay, but if you heard anything-"

"Nika." She can't see his face, but his voice comes to her flatly. "What or who you do in your time is not my business. You don't have to justify anything to me."

Everyone assumes she's still a whore. Nika can handle that. But this, _this_ is the first time she ever thought that 47 actually thinks it too. For a moment, she can't breathe from the tightness in her chest.

They have reached the landing. Nika stops to face him, but now she can barely look at the fucker. It hurts too much.

"Fine," she spits out. "I guess I'll fuck whoever pays me the best, and you can go kill for whoever pays you the best. But don't you fucking dare pretend we're any different. You sell yourself out as much as I ever will, the only difference is at least I get to see _who fucks me over when it happens!_ "

She has dropped into Russian somewhere along the line; it happens when she is too angry to control her English. But Nika knows that he understands Russian just fine. Which is why it makes it worse when 47 doesn't even bother to change his expression. She's not even worth that effort anymore.

The shaven-head hitman nods slightly to the lifts. "Go up," he tells her. His tone is perfectly level. "I still have a few things to arrange."

She doesn't look back.

It takes a long time before she finally drifts into an uneasy sleep. She promises herself this is the last time she cries for him, or any other man. Before she drifts off, Nika thinks that maybe she will meet that trick outside the park after all. There seems to be no point in fighting the world anymore.

/

It is the aftershock of the explosion more than the sound itself that wakes her.

Her teeth rattle in the shaking. Nika sits up in the darkness, disorientated, and then she's stumbling out of bed, switching the light on; then cursing and flicking it off. Turning the light on during an attack is exactly what 47 once told her _not_ to do. In the brief moment it flashes on, though, Nika sees enough to know that she is alone in the rooms. She stumbles over a chair in her night blindness, manages to find the bed again, and crawls underneath it. There is already a gun carefully placed there, and a smoke bomb. Nika grabs the cold metal, tries to control her rattling teeth, and swears never to call 47's hotel routines paranoid ever again.

It takes over a minutes for her to do this, acting on panic and muscle memory alone – she is _never_ resisting his training attempts ever again, _never_ – and by the time she does, the screaming and shouting from the floor above have dropped into a deadly silence. Occasionally, there is the sound of running footsteps above and in the corridor outside, but mostly, all Nika hears is her own rapid breathing and even more thunderous heartbeat. She tries to remember what it means – gunfire means police, amateurs; silence means...

No one is coming after her; they're only after 47 and he isn't here. She's _nobody_...

Nika bites her teeth down together and tries to stop the rest of her body from shaking. The gun is cold and heavy in her hand.

Then, she is aware that she is no longer alone. The front door in the main room has swung silently open: she can see the shaft of yellow corridor light captured between the frames of the partly open bedroom door, a shadow moving through.

Then, she is aware of a very loud silence in the air. It is the sound of someone listening very closely, and moving very, very quietly.

It occurs to Nika that while she knows that 47 isn't here, his enemies might not.

_Never trap yourself_ , 47 says in her head. _Remember your exits._

Move, Nika tells herself desperately. Come on, you stupid bitch.

She has to move now.

She has to move.

She has

to

_MOVE!_

Nika moves.

She pulls the pin, throws the bomb and throws it towards the bedroom door, in the space between the invader in the main room and the bedroom. At the same time she rolls out from under the bed, staggers to her feet and runs to the window, shooting back in wild, random shots at the doorway. Her throw is clumsy, the bomb knocking against the door and falling too far outside the bedroom, but there is enough smoke or maybe her panicked shooting causes her assassin to pause long enough that she is already half-way out of the window when the return fire starts. The window pane shatters above her. Nika forces the rest of herself through the narrow space between the ledge and the half-closed window, her nose and eyes stinging from the smoke.

She can't think, her mind a screaming white blank; and there is a rough rope in her hands and a thin old ledge under her feet between her and the traffic below, a million miles away, and fuck oh fuck, oh god fuck, she can't remember, what is she suppo—

Nika screams once, short and strained, as she falls. She falls because she is shaking so badly she loses her balance between the ledge and wind, and it saves her life. She slams against a window two floors below, and because she hadn't pushed herself off, the momentum is too weak to smash the glass. She would have fallen then if the window hadn't already been half-opened: her ankles scrap painfully against the bottom edge as half her body slides in. For a second, Nika hangs half-in, half-out, her eyes still staring up wide-eyed into the sky and white knuckles clutching her lifeline. It is a mix of adrenaline and instinct that makes her react in time – from the smoking window above, the dark figure leans out and shoots down in one smooth movement – Nika pulls herself in using the rope and collapses on the carpet just as he does. Distantly, she is aware of a woman screaming in the room around her, and a man shouting. She stumbles up, her eyes still blurred from tear-gas and terror. Her right shoulder throbs dully.

She moves.

In the corridor, there is sound of running and people shouting, but she can't see anyone, she's alone. 47 is nowhere in sight. Nika runs and tries to breathe past the sob in her throat. The corridor seems long and endless, all ordinary pastel-print wallpaper and soothing amber lights, as if a surreal nightmare turned inside out. If another assassin appears at the end of the corridor right now, she would have nowhere to hide. She runs, she limps, she struggles to breathe. The world comes in jolting, red-misted fragments: the end of a corridor; a turn; her hand splayed wide against the wall as she uses it to turn without stopping; a smear of bright red across the wallpaper.

47's tie flashes across her eyes, blood-red as well; and then, she is colliding into him, collapsing. He grabs her hard by the shoulder.

Except.

This –

Isn't –

47.

The man kicks her legs from under her, then spins her around so that she's pressed back against him and facing the end of another corridor. His arm is hooked under her throat and she is choking, her hands clawing at his arm weakly, struggling. Nika's eyes roll up. Through her blurred sight, she can see he is shaven-headed as well, and in a dark suit, and he is nothing like 47.

He shakes her once, brutally. "Look ahead," he orders her. Something cold presses against her temple: a gun muzzle. He loosens his grip a little, enough that he can force her head forward, then his arm tightens around her again. "He has to see this."

Nika has barely enough air to stay conscious, let alone fight anymore. The end of the corridor looks like a frame, glowing gently and waiting. All 47 has to do is step into it and she can go, she thinks dizzily. She can go.

There is the sound of muffled gunshots, from the connecting corridor further down. Her assassin behind her tenses up. It cuts off her air completely. And in Nika's fading consciousness, everything slows down, becomes thick and heavy-weighted. And she sees –

She hears –

A beat of ringing silence, like the heartbeat before a detonation.

A muzzle, pressed with slow insistence against her temple.

The frame of the corridor, golden and glowing and empty.

And now, turning from the corner in one fluid, time-rippling movement, a dark-eyed hitman with silver guns outstretched in both hands.

He should have hesitated when he saw her in the trapped by a fellow hitman. Should have paused, if only to re-adjust his aiming for a shot that wouldn't end up as a hole in her forehead. Nika knows she expected him to. She definitely knows that her assassin was counting on him to.

But even in the slow-motion of her mind, 47 doesn't hesitate.

He comes around the corner. Even as he does, he is already shooting once, twice. Clean and efficient. Precise and deliberate.

Nika's body reacts before her mind realizes.

She jerks back against the man behind her. Once, twice. The pain is surprisingly minimal. The shock is not.

47 has shot her.

As she sinks to the ground, her would-be assassin releasing her dead weight, she catches the man's eyes. They look amazed as well.

Then the black claims her, and Nika is gone.

* * *

She wakes up in hell. She must be in hell because one, she was a whore in her old life; and two –

Everything _hurts._

Nika opens her eyes and finds herself staring at the cloth-covered face of a medic. Behind him, the ceiling is swishing past at an alarming speed. She's on a gurney of some sort, and he's pushing her.

She raises her head slightly, and regrets it immediately.

" _Fuck!_ "

"Oh," the medic says inanely. "You're awake."

Her shoulder fucking _hurts_. The pain steals her breath for a moment. She hisses.

"What the hell happened?"

Her bewilderment gets eaten by the noise of the corridor. There are policemen and people everywhere, and they all seem to be trying to shout over each other. The noise is incredible. They pass a room where a woman is sobbing hysterically inside, another medic trying to calm her down. Nika watches dazedly. She tries again, louder:

"He shot me." She can't tell if she's more stunned or hurt.

"Yes," the medic agrees. "I saw. Special blanks to get you out of the picture. Very cleverly done."

"You saw?" Then her confusion sharpens into urgency. "Did you see where he went? The man who shot me?"

"Er, yes. He just left actually."

"But he can't..."

She stops. The medic continues pushing her rapidly through the chaos of the corridor. He really is going fairly fast, considering the amount of people milling about. But Nika is blind to it all.

"He left me." It's funny how it still hurts no matter how many times she says it, like scratching an open wound. "Here. He left me here."

"He stayed with you till after midnight," the medic offers, as if that's supposed to comfort her. "And ah, bandaged your shoulder? See?"

Nika tilts her head, looks at her right shoulder dully. Her blood is already staining the makeshift bandages red, a parody of a blossoming flower. At least 47 had kept her from bleeding out before he abandoned her to strangers. At least.

"Some fucking blank."

The medic looks at her thoughtfully as he pushes her into the lift. "That wasn't him."

The lift doors shut, sealing them in their own space of silence. The man takes off his mask, sighs; then looks down at her interestedly. Aside from a pale scar marking the side of his face, he looks remarkably ordinary, his mess of light brown hair cut short and neat to his sides. So it takes a while before the intensity of his stare manages to pull Nika out of her growing despair.

"What?" she snaps.

"Oh, sorry." The man looks contrite. "It's just that... you look a little different from your pictures in your file, that's all. But in a good way."

He smiles down at her. It is such an open, friendly smile that for one disorientated beat, Nika doesn't understand.

Then she does.

"Who are you?"

Her accent always thickens when she's terrified. He ignores her.

"You know, you may be the hardest mark I've ever tried to track," he says confidingly. "I think I was getting close to finding your hideout too, but then he went and pulled you out."

" _Who are you?_ "

The lift doors open. Outside, it is the car park basement, flickering with dim fluorescents and deathly quiet. She is trapped and alone. And 47 has left her in the hands of his enemies.

Her captor smiles. "Me?" He steers her out of the lift. There is no one else around.

"I'm the one that no one ever sees coming."


	3. The Beginning of Everything Else

You would think that with all the times that she's been bagged and blindfolded and body-snatched in her life, Nika would be a little calmer, would be a little more accepting of being dragged off by yet another stranger to be killed or sold or used as bait or whatever, but the truth is: despite the story of her life, Nika has never managed to master the art of giving up.

Her shoulder is really starting to  _hurt._

"Where are you taking me?" She strains to look behind her, terror overpowering the spike of agony in her shoulder – her captor is speeding her through the underground carpark towards a sleek black car, all horsepower and tinted windows. Her heart stutters. "What do you want,  _where are you taking me?_ "

The man pats her on her good shoulder distractedly. "Shh, it's alright." The gurney jerks to a halt: he's moved her to the side of the car, the door already opened hungrily. Inside, a dark tongue of leather back seats.

At least it isn't the fucking boot again, a part of Nika thinks madly. She thinks she can taste her pulse in her mouth.

"Can you get up?" Her captor takes her by her left elbow, tries to brace her up. He grins at her with a kind of mad excitement, not a reassuring sight. "On the count of three, one-two-"

"Fuck you, I'm not going— ah!"

"Three!" says the man cheerfully, and an arm is suddenly under her knees, another supporting her back and Nika is lifted off the gurney, carried in the air, dropped down on the backseat before she has time to really struggle. The shock of landing judders her shoulder. Her vision blurs briefly. For a moment all she sees is the red mist from the corridor, from her gasping escape: the jolting fragments, a shadow above her, 47's sharply-etched silhouette as he turns the corner. Her captor says something she doesn't catch through her pain; Nika claws at him weakly. He's pushing her down so that she's stretched out on the seats as if in the familiar beginnings of a rape. But then he actually starts pulling her shirt off, tugging it over her stomach and bare breasts, leaving her naked save for her panties and –

"Fuck you," Nika snarls, in English this time, and reality may be hitting her between the ribs in the form of fear, but it feels a lot like anger as well and she'll take whatever form of courage she can get. "Are you fucking serious, you want to fuck  _now_ -"

"A _ha_ , no-" the sonofabitch crushes down one of her flailing wrists. "Not to be rude, but could you stop moving?"

"You-"

Nika struggles up – or at least, she tries to. The man crouched beside her in the car reaches over and squeezes her wounded shoulder, hard. Nika screams. "Please don't," she thinks she hears him say through the copper haze. Something cold slaps on her chest, followed by more on her upper arms, her thighs and shins. "I really need you to stay still, Nika," he continues, and the fucker actually sounds apologetic.

There is a humming below the seat, rising like a warning. Everything hurts senselessly; she can't breathe from the blood soaked in the air. "Please," she gasps. He still hasn't let go of her shoulder.

"I know," the man says soothingly. "Just more five seconds."

"Please-"

"Four."

"—it hurts, _please_ -"

"I know, shh. Three."

Three fucking what? Too late, Nika looks down at her chest. Black patches, red wires attached. Red wires leading down below the car seat, where the humming is rising, rising –

There is a click.

"One," the man says. He lets go of her shoulder.

And with –

a white

shattering

 _pain_  –

And very simply, without ceremony, Nika Boronina dies.

/

Remember: the real problem here isn't Nika. The real problem here is him.

/

It would be easy to make Boronina stay.

He wouldn't even need to point a gun, or any such crude gestures.

47 knows the fine art of walking softly and carrying a big stick, is familiar with the subtle underbelly of animal violence. He knows the sweet spot between dread and imagination, and he knows how a man can press - precisely, terribly - to get what he wants. Sometimes the lightest touch is all you need, like a pinch of gunpowder on a scale... and then the tipping point slides over into red, the body count rackets up.

With the witness, all he would need to do is to return to Boronina's room after the last bloodbath of the year and day. He would speak quietly, still stinking of sweat and blood and shaking his knuckles still swollen from overuse. He would let her know in the words of his childhood what he expects: obedience, discipline. He would tear in half the return ticket he had bought for her before Nika's farewell announcement on the plane, and the gesture would be small one, ordinary and so harmless. He would put the pieces on the bedside table, and he would lay down his gun on it just like an afterthought, a gleaming paperweight. He would leave the room to shower then, and when he gets out, 47 knows what he would find: Nika Boronina, ex-whore of Mikhail Bellicoff. Terrified whore to her new owner. The old Nika before Istanbul, before the fear of him left her eyes and she started arguing with him as if she had never known pain.

That wordless spot between dread and imagination. He would remind her of what he is, and what he can still do to her. The witness would never mention leaving again.

So, it would be easy to make Boronina stay. Except, of course, it would also be a mistake.

It would be a mistake on top of his first mistake of keeping the witness alive in the first place. It would be a mistake on top of running the fucking year and day, for stringing out his life for no other reason than - what?  _What?_ Because he of all people knew how final death was, and he had not wanted her to die yet? Because - no, 47 knows with a flat certainty in the same way he knows the weight of a unloaded gun that Nika Boronina has no particular skills or connections or information; that she is nothing special in a world where thousands get murdered every day. 47 is starting to think he never had a real reason at all. And so really, the only question he should be considering now -  _the question he should have considering all along_  - is whether he should kill the witness now, or later.

She has seen his face. All the agencies want her dead. If he kills her now, before the year and day ends, 47 knows despite everything, he would have his choice of agencies to choose from. Her death at his hands so close to the end of the year and day would transform the game, make it become his. It would broadcast his reputation for ruthlessness and unpredictability so deafeningly that 47 suspects his old Organisation might even try to approach him again.

And if he kills her after - well. He could probably never return as an agent again for his crime of winning the year and day, but what it would do to his reputation might make him the most demanded freelancer in this blood industry. Not to mention the first freelancer to operate with the cloak of apparent agency immunity. It's something to think about.

So 47 thinks on this in the last few days building up to the end of the year and day. He thinks on it when he forces himself to eat a - a something, a stuffed bun, just consumable energy - somewhere after his second near-miss and third kill since his last sleep. The bread tastes like grease and nothing else, like everything he eats these days. He thinks on it when an unexpected crush of three freelancers trap him in the fourth floor of a half-finished industrial complex on the second to last day with semi-automatics and gas bombs as if flushing out a rat, when he blasts his way down to the ground and manages to bring half the building down with him. He hacks out concrete dust from his lungs and uses more bullets and luck than actual aiming to bring down two of them, and is wondering whether it is poison in the gas or sheer exhaustion that is making it difficult to breathe and _where the hell is that third lancer_ , when the rest of the building roars down and he escapes with literally a leap of faith. He takes close to two hours to get back into the right part of town, because the car he arrived in is fucked and the loose thread he failed to kill back at the site has probably run up all the alerts up by now, and the whole time he is walking, ducking, climbing through rain-slick windows and breaking into dark windowed cars, he is thinking:  _Eighteen hours. Eighteen hours. Just eighteen more hours._

It is either a countdown to the end of the year and day, or Boronina's life. He hasn't decided yet.

He is so tired.

When 47 gets back to the hotel, the sky has sunk down sullenly around each street lamp to ring them in halos of black. In the lift, he slumps against the corner and his body protests, but the pain has gone distant, resigned. It is possible that he blacks out in the micro-sleeps that have become increasingly common when he isn't fighting for his life, and then the lift doors open and a woman and a man comes in, breaking with their furious murmurs his slow fall into a standing sleep. The woman's face is closed, angry, and 47 leaves the lift soon after even though his room is still one floor up.

When he gets to the room, the lights are turned low, and Boronina is curled up in a corner of the bed, turned away from the door. She is wearing a shirt, which is good, and the shirt is not his, which is also good. He indulged her games and whims for too long, and now she is finally learning. Not that it matters, 47 remembers, and he goes to the bathroom to wash the dust from his face and hands. When the bandaging is done, 47 stands in there for a long while, staring at the man that he does not recognise in the mirror and listening to the woman in the next room pretending to sleep. There are bruises starting to grow under his eyes from the lack of sleep, something he had not thought they allowed in his genetic makeup. Then again, it appears that there are many things that they did not mean to allow in his genetic makeup.

He doesn't bother with the lights, just sets an alarm for two hours from now and collapses on the bed. Boronina's breathing catches, then eases carefully back into the deep rhythm. Her shirt has rucked up against her back, revealing the soft hollow of her back as it follows her spine. For a brief moment, there is that old urge to trace the thin white scars cutting across her back. To press with his thumb at the edges of them so that bloodlessness of her skin swallows up the scars even briefly. To remake the past. He thinks of the first woman he slept with, in a stark room under the eyes of the hooded brothers in the Organisation; he thinks of the first woman he killed, of that abrupt red hole in her forehead and the falling corpse after. He thinks of the woman in the lift, how easily her partner had reached for her. How she had not turned away. Boronina's breathing is paced and deliberate next to him, her back like a small wall, and  _Christ_ , he is just so fucking tired, all the lessons and vineyards in the world and  _none of this_   _even matters anymore_ -

When he gets out of bed, Boronina's breathing quickens briefly. The fist that has been curled in 47's gut for the last few days tightens, sinks so breathlessly deep for a moment that he has to pause at the doorway. Well, let her be afraid of him: she should be. He leaves the room without attempting to be quiet and finds his way to one of the six other rooms he has booked in this hotel. He has left enough false trails to other more obscure, more credible safehouses in this sprawling city that it should take at least until after midnight tomorrow night before the agencies think to check places such as this one. And by then, it wouldn't matter: it would be over. It would be as if Boronina never happened.

In the new empty room, as with most things, 47 finds that even the act of sleeping is simpler without the witness.

/

Five hours from the end of the year and day, something is wrong.

It is a knowledge that has been seeping slow and cold into him since the night before, born from nothing but the deafening silence of no one coming after him. Silence, and an old, wordless instinct.

He has spent most of the day creating white noise at the increasing outskirts of town, widening the circle as if on the run and trying to shake any tails. Only one agent comes scouting around towards the late afternoon, and even then the reconnaissance is cursory and swift. The rest of the sniffers that come are wild-eyed and unpolished, just freelancers who happened to be in the area, give or take a couple of countries. By the time the sky is burnt a deep blue, no one has died since sunrise and 47 forces himself to face the truth that he is fooling no one. Something is wrong.

He takes quickest path back to the hotel and has the witness' tracker in one hand the whole time.

In the hotel, Boronina is not in her room, or at the pool. 47 ignores the spike of adrenaline jump-starting his heart, recalibrates the tracker and waits for it to refine the target's location in the building. He is calm. He does not run. After three more breaths, the tracker proves to be worth the fortune it cost and shows the witness to be on the first floor, on the far right quarter of the hotel. She looks to be heading towards the stairwell there to get to the facilities on the second floor.

When he gets to the second floor, Boronina has not yet made her way up. He gets halfway down the stairs when he hears her voice, only slightly muffled by the thick carpeting and the curve of the stairwell.  _Meet me at the park at seven,_ she is telling someone.  _Don't be late_. It is the politest way yet that he has heard her tell someone to fuck off.

He turns around the corner just in time to see the man she was talking to disappear below. Fair headed, five feet eight, some muscle but no ability to handle himself. Harmless. Boronina watches him go, one arm hugging her own waist protectively; then she looks up, startled. The abrupt drop in her face is unmistakable.

And.

That is…

Something in 47 shuts down.

"I've moved everything to the room opposite yours," he tells the witness. He sounds distant to himself, far away as the reverberation of an underground detonation. He thinks he sounds steady. The fist in his stomach has tightened again, vicious as a punch from the blindside - it's just that he has not eaten well, lately, and this must be a side effect. There is no reason to be angry at all. "Stay there. Something isn't right."

He watches as the witness tries to cover up her dread of him with a smile; she is a terrible actress. 47 does not care. When he turns to move up back up the stairs, he even slows ever so patiently to let the witness catch up, because he is calm and rational, because he does not care. Because the witness' view of him is her own affair. She is babbling now, trying to explain why she told yet another man to fuck off, and for some reason that makes him - not angrier, because there is still no reason for 47 to be angry, but - impatient. He had not noticed when the witness had actually started to be afraid of him again. "Stay in the room until midnight," he cuts off Boronina. "I have an - assignment until then."

The witness pauses. "Okay," she says. She's wearing her face clean and freshly scrubbed again, a new woman with the same bright green eyes. She looks young and so lovely he can barely look at her. She looks particularly untouchable, like this. He knows she choose this look deliberately. "Okay, but listen-"

It is too much. "What and who you do in your own time is your own affair," he snaps, before he can stop himself. "You don't have to explain anything to me."

They have reached the second floor. When 47 turns to Boronina, her face has gone white and she has that staggered look of someone who's taken a hit without bracing for it. He imagines it is a look that she wore often when Belicoff owned her and now, look, he's done it too. He has always known instinctively how to use a weapon in a way that it would cut the deepest, hurt the most, and now it seems his way with words are no different. For a horrible moment, 47 thinks Boronina is going to cry.

Then something in Boronina's face twists and she lashes back, radiating all fury and no fear, and if words really were weapons, he would have to concede the field to the witness. Her Russian, as always, is explicit. A maid further down the corridor stops and stares in the middle of pushing her cart, too far to hear the details of Boronina's explosive diatribe but close enough that it must be obvious that they are in a fight. 47 moves, slight and casual, just enough to block Boronina's face from the maid's line of sight.

"Go up," he nods to the lifts. "I still have matters to arrange."

The witness stares at him. That mark she chose for herself is fierce and black on her cheekbone. Nika Boronina, owned by no one but herself. She ran her own year and day long before she met him.

There is something closing 47's throat - like yellow gas, or perhaps it is anger at last. Few have talked to him the way Boronina has and lived much longer. Boronina stares at him, then she closes her eyes and turns to go down the stairwell again, presumably to where the first level lifts are, or perhaps to the bar.

47 stands there for a while after that. Reminds himself it doesn't matter. It doesn't. What matters is that it is close to four hours before midnight. He used to wonder what it was like to be a freelancer, to choose the cities he would visit and to stay as long or fleetingly as he liked. It seems like he might find out at last.

/

Twenty minutes to midnight, the explosion hits.

He is too far away to feel it, but the sound rips a hole in the night and fills it with the growing sounds of distant screams a heartbeat later. He is on a roof when it hits, and turns just in time to see the aftermath of glass spraying out from the detonated room in the distant building, the blood-orange smoke punching it out into the air with a force that knocks the air out of his lungs.

_Nika._

47 stares. Then training overtakes his frozen horror and he comes back to himself just in time to sidestep the knife, twist his opponent's arm behind his back and break the man's knees and neck in that order. Two seconds. He vaults off the roof, lands and rolls on the ground below just as the rope goes slack in his hands; there are shouts above as his pursuers realise they didn't cut the rope in time. Three seconds. A car screeching up, a bullet through the windscreen, another dead man on the street and then there's an engine snarling under his hands and the metallic beat of his pulse hard in his mouth, solid as swallowed bullets. Five seconds.

And in the time it takes most people to reload a gun, 47 is blazing through the near empty streets, towards the hotel on the other side of the river.

He'll still be too late. He knows this, because 47 has hunted down targets all his waking life, and knows the timing for these things are crucial, and he is too late.  _He will be too fucking late to get to Nika in time because he should have been with her when they found her._

How? How did they find her? It had been a gamble, yes, but it had been a calculated gamble, a  _good fucking gamble_  that every agency with any sense would devote all resources to sniff out each of safehouses that are scattered like mines throughout this city, the kind of half-hidden street house that he has deliberately only used for the last six months, instead of that fucking prominent tourist trap of a building -

The hotel at last: 47 forgoes subtlety and screams the car to a halt almost into the entrance. People are pouring out, falling across the hood, mindless and shrill in their terror. In the distance, 47 dimly registers the night lighting up with the call of sirens; then he is in the crowd, he is in the hotel, he is in the stairs and all he hears is the thundering in his ears, rapid as automatic fire and underneath it, the thick, unnatural silence of a dead trap.

He is in the maintenance stairwell, somewhere between the second and third floor. The third and fourth floor. The fourth and fifth floor. There is a .45 in his hand and the tracker in the other, and he is just rounding up to the sixth floor, the long concrete stairwell incredibly, unnervingly empty when the tracker flashes green, zooms and enlarges, zooms and enlarges again. Fifth floor. The green mark just moving out of a private suite.

She must have jumped.  _She could be alive._

Or they are dragging her corpse out as bait, imitating life to end his. It is something he would have done.

His lungs are straining against his ribs, fighting for oxygen in volumes he refuses to allow because his own harsh breathing would be deafening in this silence. It makes him dizzy, dangerously light-headed, but he is now moving through the open corridors on floor five, and he is listening hard as he ever has in his life. The thick carpet underfoot eats nearly all sound. Each corner turn is a glacial, hyper climatic risk of gunfire he will not be able to outmaneuver; each corner turn reveals yet more stretches of corridor, beige and starkly,  _wrongly_ empty.

Ordinary people don't clear areas this quickly.  _Something is wrong_. There are shouts and the rapid thudding of people running and even muffled shots, but it is all faraway, irrelevant. The tracker shows she has stopped abruptly in her move towards him: he is nearly there. He is here.

 _She could be alive_.

47 stops. Yet another corner turn before him. He listens, pressed against the wall and thinks he hears something could be more than the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. Something like the sound of someone, waiting.

The man breathes, breathes, clears his mind. The faintest shaking in his hands steadies out.

Then the weapon named 47 rounds the corner, precise and deadly. Tracker falling to the ground. Two guns outstretched.

It barely takes one second.

/

_After -_

\- Nika goes down, her assassin following swiftly; the desperate check of the witness' pulse; the sudden awareness of approaching hostiles; the necessary abandonment of Nika in one of the holes in the thin walls of this hotel apparently called rooms -

_After -_

\- the explosion of bullets and smoke in the corridors; the firefight that spans two and a half floors and one bloody stairwell; the rapidly rising body count and the realisation that most of the men aren't actually trying to kill him, _which means_ -

_After -_

\- returning to Nika in time to put a bullet in the back of an agent's head; the cornered retreat to the bathroom deep tub; the realisation that he's not going to survive this; the abrupt silence and settling plaster dust; the slow realisation that it's past midnight and he has actually survived this,  _he has won the year and day_ -

 _After_  -

After.

He finds another hole in the wall. Supply closet, this time. The seam of the door smoothly hidden by the curve in the wall: not enough to fool anyone looking for long, but enough for them to stay hidden until he's found a safe way out.

He sits in the darkness with the unconscious woman propped next to him, and listens to the sound of the world outside the closet explode with shouts of anger and the heavy tread of official boots and the panicked roar of people with absolutely no understanding of the minor war that has just torn the building apart. Adrenaline keeps him alert despite the darkness, keeps his finger light and dangerous on the trigger. Or perhaps it is the light-headed high that comes before the body-shattering crash of exhaustion, he can't tell. He doesn't care. Nika's head is warm and heavy against his shoulder, and her hair smells like sweat and chlorine and that undefinable essence that she has always carried since she first laid her head against his shoulder in a sun-drenched train a lifetime ago, and she is breathing. That is all that matters. She is still breathing.

He checks with one hand the makeshift bandages around Nika's shoulder, where the bleeding has not stopped but has at least slowed. His fingers catch clumsily against the line of the bandages; he stops, watches the woman next to him, starts again. Gentler, this time. The bullet went clean just below her clavicle, just enough that she might get out of this without a permanent disability. Or she might not; it doesn't matter. She's alive. She's alive. His fingers follow up the line of bandages to spread under Nika's jaw, his thumb slipping against the soft hollow there. Her pulse seems erratic until he realises that he's the one shaking, and starts again. He counts her heartbeat and counts the seconds, the same rhythm that bombs tick and helicopter blades beat and Nika used to speak when she confessed her past to him on the quietest of nights, and eventually the world steadies out under him. His heart calms. His head clears. He forces himself to stop cupping her cheek, and his hand falls back down to his side. He becomes 47 again.

The heavy tread of official boots outside have gone. 47 angles the woman beside him carefully against the corner of the shelves behind them, stands to pull his tie and jacket off with one hand. He checks the only .45 he has left: two bullets. Right. He opens the door.

The chaos of the corridor hits him with all the deafening force of a percussion grenade. 47 slips out of the storage space, closes the door on the unconscious woman still inside. He starts moving down the corridor at a steady pace, past soot-smeared firemen and groups of shepherded civilians and hotel staff who look confused and frightened and angry at being questioned. Everything is too loud and too bright, the light stinging his eyes and throbbing in an unforgiving rhythm at the base of his skull. 47 keeps his head down and eyes sharp, waits in appropriate pauses for people to move in and out of rooms and his way, and tries not to look like he is capable of leaving a body trail long enough to line the corridors as he has tonight.

He finds a lone medic three turns down. It probably takes longer than it should have to lead the man somewhere quieter and knock him out, but the adrenaline rush is now long gone, and 47 is frankly just grateful that his body is still cooperating enough to continue at all. He strips off the unconscious man's blue medic jacket and cap. He tucks the man's body behind the door of an abandoned suite.

Then 47 emerges from the room as a new medic in a blue jacket. He takes the empty gurney waiting outside the suite, moving through the corridors much quicker than when he came through. As expected, this time, most move out of his way and no one gives the rushing medic a second glance.

After this, he will get repackage Boronina as a patient and hijack an ambulance out of here.

He will bring them deeper into Eastern Europe, and he will find her a suitably discreet doctor somewhere along the way.

And since it is clear after tonight that he will apparently tear a city apart before allowing the witness to be terminated, for marrow-deep reasons he does not have the time or energy to unearth now, he will take the witness to her vineyard, and he will leave her there. Alive. Alone, as requested.

Things should follow much more logically after that. He will need sleep and time to recover from what feels like a couple of fractured ribs. He will need to make sure that the agencies keep their promise, and that the freelancers know that any independent curiosity will be fatal to the investigator. He will need to wean himself off the dextroamphetamine pills he has been living off these past couple of months, and back into a sleep cycle approaching normal; he will need to build up his depleted weapon caches in the major cities and his even more depleted funds; he will need to find a way to start working quietly and ever more closely with the various intelligence agencies of the technically legal side of the industry to start reworking a dormant minefield of secrets and favours in preparation of that rainy day he needs to go to the ground again.

He will need to do all this and _then,_ 47 thinks, navigating his way around another medic waiting for the lifts in the hall lobby, when he has rebuilt himself and the world has all but forgotten about Nika Boronina, perhaps _then_ … he might find his way again to a small vineyard in rural Russia. If he does, he will approach slowly, and from a distance. He will leave his guns in his car. He will go to her slow and bare-handed under bright sunlight, and there would be no mention of  _discipline_ , or  _obedience_ , or any wordless spot between dread and imagination; he will not bring his version of dogs to hunt her down, the way Bellicoff did. He saw the look in her eyes tonight just before he brought her down with blanks. He sees it still. No: 47 will move carefully and speak softly, without threat or expectation, and he will not be angry or disappointed or bitter in the same way there is no point in being angry or disappointed or bitter at a burn victim who no longer wishes to live with any form of fire.

And then, perhaps by  _then_ … Nika may have forgotten that he is something to be afraid of.

The storage room holding Nika is coming up. 47 turns the corner of the corridor into the next. There are much fewer witnesses now, and only two armed officers in sight at the far end. The doors of all the rooms down the corridors are already wide open, the officer going down the hall to do a final check for each room and close the door. 47 slows. One officer disappears into a room further down. The other looks straight at him, and 47 tenses – but the man's gaze slides over and a woman in a maid's outfit calls to him; he turns away. 47 waits until he's sure that the other potential witnesses are distracted, then he pushes the gurney to the side, opens the door of the storage room and –

Time stops.

The small room gapes back at him, broken-toothed with gaps between the shelves lining the wall. A bloody smear, gleaming on the pale shelving. And in the middle of the floor, something small and black. A phone.

But nothing else. Nika isn't there.

_Nika isn't there._

/

When Nika wakes up for the third time in the same night, she doesn't realize at first.

There is a teeth-numbing shock of bright hurt so sudden that it almost doesn't register. Nika wakes up gasping, flailing; the world broken into brittle shards that crackle along her skin and leave white sparks behind her eyes. Someone is holding her down, saying something; she grabs onto them blindly, an anchor. A hot pain flares up immediately in her right shoulder: she screams.

"Shh, shh," the anchor says. "Calm down - Nika,  _calm down_." He grabs her by the chin. Blue jacket, white cross, he's a – "I'm not going to hurt you. Do you understand?  _I'm not going to hurt you_. Now calm down."

His eyes are animal-bright, and too close. Nika stops fighting. Her shoulder hurts like fuck. She's bleeding. She's wounded. She's in a car with a, a medic and there's a shocking red wetness down her arm and front and oh god, god, there's so much blood; why is she in a car. Nika's thoughts stall, panic-stricken and uncomprehending. The medic slides a needle into her shoulder.

 _Medic_ , Nika thinks; and –

\- and the hotel the explosion the attack – that other man. That other hitman. 47 had shot her. Rubber blanks. He saved her life again. He left her anyway.

 _But how could he_  –

He left her anyway.

"That was a local," the man says. "It should help with the pain. Can you sit up?"

She lets him help her up. Behind him, the world is painted black, shot through with pinpoints of starlight - they're outside. From the windscreen, she sees a streetlight squinting down at them with a sullen amber glow. It colours in the surroundings enough that she can see they've parked in some deserted backyard, large steel dumpsters crouched along the edges. In the distance, sirens are screaming.

And this is…

She feels…

Nika once knew a girl who fell for her owner. She had even told 47 a variation of it: that the girl was very young and dumb and sweet, with hair the colour that Nika would kill for because do you know the price that natural blondes fetch; and she was trusting. All this was true. She'd told him that whores usually give discounts to the handsome tricks; this girl just always gave a shameless discount to this one trick every time. This was also true. What she hadn't told 47 was that the trick was Belicoff. That sometimes, Belicoff would want to fuck someone who didn't have her practiced smirks and strut and piercings that he made her get, and would risk his precious public image to pick up a whore from the streets to amuse himself. He played with this one like a doll, gave her pretty things and petted her head like she was a dog, until three weeks later he got bored and gave her to his bodyguards so he could watch. His bodyguards, who liked to hear women scream and liked sharp toys, and who were one of the reasons why Nika made sure Belicoff was never, ever bored with her. The worst part was when the girl cried when she found out and said she didn't understand. Nika remembers thinking: this is why I will never fall in love. She remembers telling 47: it didn't work out, obviously, but she seemed happy while it lasted.

And now it seems that even with the benefit of a vicarious life lesson, she still fucked up. She fell for a killer simply because he had never hit her and he had listened when he had no reason to and he had bought her her dream, something she should have known was too good to be true. And maybe she had been happy at first, when he was still interested enough that he treated her like she meant something; but even when that ended, she still held on, she'd actually hoped. And she had hoped all the way until tonight, stupid and stubborn, because apparently that's what fucked up whores like her do: they believe that nameless men who murder for a living are actually good men inside; that when he gives her the occasional visit and touches her face like she's some tamed pet, it's because he cares. And when the murderer grows bored and leaves her for his enemies to fuck over, it's the same old story again, the only thing that ever remains true: all that the poor dumb whore can do is cry and say,  _I don't understand_.

"Oh Christ," her new owner says, and manhandles her out of the car in time for her to throw up on the gravel outside. She throws up water and bile, the man half-carrying her. When there's nothing left but dry heaving, he settles her against the back tyre of the car, the rubber still warm against her back.

The gravel are ice shards digging into her palms and thighs. Her shoulder feels like a separate part of her body; her chest feels like someone used her as a punching bag. It feels like it's making it difficult to breathe until Nika realises she's crying.

"There, there," her captor hovers above her uselessly, which would be fucking hilarious if everything else didn't hurt. Nika ignores him, just wipes her wet face furiously and tries to pull herself together. She is taking a few steadying gulps of air when the light blocks out abruptly and something gets pushed by her ear, hard and cold. She looks up to see her owner nodding over her like encouraging a child. "Say hi," he prompts.

"Fuck you," Nika says automatically. But her voice comes out bewildered and raw. The man draws back, puts the thing next to his own ear. A phone.

"Distressed, but alive." He pauses. "Yes, I know. Nadrazi station, last platform, ten minutes." He thumbs off the phone and slips it somewhere under his blue medic jacket, and looks down at her. "Ah good, you've stopped crying. I wouldn't rush you, but I have a schedule to keep, and we must get going."

She doesn't resist when he lifts her up and bodily ushers her into the front passenger seat. "Who was that?" Nika says, more out of habit than any real hope of getting an actual answer. "What the fuck did you do to me, why are you taking-" The door slams on her. The lock clicks down. She tries again when her captor re-enters the car beside her, the engine rumbling to life around them. "I don't know anything, why can't you just let me-"

"As flattering as your faith in my Russian language abilities are, I'm afraid it's still quite rudimentary at this point," her driver says. The car snarls out of the lot, the lights overhead flashing in a streak of amber. He gives her that switchblade smile she thinks is meant to look apologetic. "English, please, Nika. Or German, French or Spanish, if you prefer, aha _ha._ " A couple of sirens scream pass, going the other way.

Nika presses back into the corner of her passenger seat. The psycho notices. "There's nothing to be afraid of," he says, against all evidence. He pets her on her thigh vaguely; Nika flinches violently. "I'll drop you off in, ah, seven and a half minutes. Ex-Agent Romeo will come around under four after, I expect. Cue tearful reunion, hugs and kisses all around,  _oh Codename 47, how I've missed you, why yes John treated me very well, in fact he stopped my heart and saved my life, some might even say he saved your life - what? Oh no no darling, of course you're still the best contractor around, although teech-nically if someone saves your cargo for you, then_ he's _really the best around isn't he…_ " He glances at her. "No, you're right, that's probably too much for tonight. Let's just focus on  _John saved my life_  and  _we should really be grateful to dear John and definitely not go after him_ , shall we?"

Nika finds her words. "How - you saved my life? You  _stopped_  my heart?" And then, slightly less wild and quieter, because hope is a terrible, focused thing: "He's coming back for me?"

"I restarted your heart,  _restarted_ ," her driver says quickly. "Your heart stopping was just a small… side effect of stopping the signal of your tracker. You didn't seem like you'd be willing to tell me where your implant was any time soon, and I needed to stop the signal before you broadcast our position to the agencies. A full body shock was the only way. And I did restart your heart again in under four minutes," he says reasonably.

He misreads her spiralling bewilderment entirely. "Did you think it was a coincidence that the hotel was so well set up tonight? It was clear towards the end that Codename 47 must have implanted a tag on you, the only question was how to break it. But oh, the signal was so clever, wasn't it, so tricky. Too tricky. How many can build a tracker like that? Haywood? Mochulyak? The Lunz brothers? Well, someone found the Lunz brothers three days ago. They made them talk. Oh, they've broken all kinds of rules to get to you, Nika Boronina. The agencies won't be seeing help from certain factions in this industry any time soon. They didn't just find out where you were,  _they found out how to find you._ And they almost won too. But you can tell Codename 47 to thank me for that helpful little detonation earlier tonight. And  _you_ can hardly complain about a minor cardiac arrest if it was to take the agencies' hook out of you..."

The car swerves viciously around a corner, leaving the pit of her stomach behind. Nika barely registers it. She can barely register his words. There is some sort of blood game afoot, people are looking for her, and 47 had put something fucking  _in her_  as either protection or bait, and this man next to her has taken it out again. Why would anyone even want to find her? It must be Bellicoff, and the people he must have hired to go after her before he was finally put into the fucking ground - god, can she never run far enough, even when that bastard's dead?

But right now, this hardly matters. That quiet, focused voice in her doesn't care. Because every unanswered question will be answered when,  _if_ -

" _Is he coming back for me_ ," Nika hears someone say again, and her voice is louder this time, steadier.

She watches the man go briefly still when he looks at her. Then he smiles. "Aha _ha_ , we'll find out soon, won't we. Here we are."

They skid into an open lot. Her driver is out of the car even before it finishes sliding into a brutal stop. He half helps, half bodily lifts her out of the passenger seat, where the night chill greets her as a full body slap. She's wearing nothing but a scrap of panties, and a bloodied half-unbuttoned man's dress shirt, but her captor doesn't seem to care - he guides her ahead of him, her good arm twisted in his hard grip behind her back, barely pausing when she stumbles at the rapid pace. There is no one around, just the bare black sky and the numbingly cold gravel beneath her feet. And just ahead of them, a large wooden structure that seems to be held together only by its faint silhouette against the night.

Her captor pushes her through the door of the decrepit thing. They pass through a series of broken-down rooms and broken-locked doors, where old bits of broken glass catch and bite under her feet. Then abruptly, they are out again under the open sky - except this time there is a rail track next to them, an old train hissing and groaning its stop and stretching before them, a thin platform scattered with bleary-eyed stragglers struggling to get their luggages up the train.

Nika stops swearing in her amazement. The man behind her takes advantage of her momentary docility to steer her down the empty carriages and force her up the third one down. He pushes her into the first cabin on the right, draws the curtains over the doors. "First class," the fucker winks at her when he turns back to her, as if he didn't just throw her on the ground. Nika's right shoulder feels wet: the hole in it has started to bleed again. "Oh dear, let's get you up." He helps her up on the seat, a gentleman again, where Nika backs herself against the corner near the window. The carpets are thin underfoot, the seat is threadbare, and the sickly light from the station coming in through the smudged, cracked window is enough for Nika to recognise it as one of those ancient connecting trains in which a valid first class ticket stuck inside the cabin's corridor window is enough to guarantee privacy for the length of the journey. Bellicoff used to call these 'fuck or die' cabins, for fuck's sake. Nika tries not to shake.

Her captor starts to sit beside her before he seems to change his mind and takes off his blue medic jacket to tuck it thoughtfully around her. He pulls her good arm through one sleeve, ignoring her stiffness and flinching. He even takes his time in carefully doing up the zipper for her like doing up a one-armed straightjacket, the heavy weight of the bulky jacket pulling down on her wounded shoulder.

Then he kneels in front of her and takes her free hand in his. "Dear Nika. I can see that you don't quite understand everything that's happened tonight, which is a little surprising to me. One day you'll have to tell me the story of how you convinced the great 47 to abort his directive and keep you alive. But," he says earnestly, "I think you believe that I don't want to hurt you if I can, Nika. And I'd appreciate it if you could convince Codename 47 that it's not in his best interest to come after me. At least, not right now. I'll contact you again when I'm ready to call in my favour for saving you tonight." Something hard is pressed into her hand. Nika looks down: it's that phone again, sleek and black. She looks back into her captor's wide, watchful eyes.

"Who  _are_  you?" she manages.

His smile flashes, switchblade quick. "You can call me John. Jonathan Smith."

"That's not your real name," Nika says unthinkingly. Her captor's face goes still. And despite his shock of brown hair and lightning smiles, despite the way this psychopath is nothing  _at all_  like 47, Nika recognises it: the abrupt way his expression goes still and opaque as a dark pond, the way 47 would go when he was caught off guard. Or perhaps it is the way this man is so carefully unlike 47 while still driving and moving in the same neat, savage way that jars at her - Nika is used to living in a mask too, and knows how to recognise another actor when she sees one.

The realisation makes her giddy, almost fearless in her terror. "What's your number?" She watches his eyes narrow slightly, continues wildly, "You're the same, you come from the same place, you know-"

The hitman stands abruptly. "Alas, we have run out of time." He glances out the window. "So can I count on you, Nika?" He looks down at her mute confusion. "To convince 47 not to come after me for now," he prompts. He pulls something out from behind him, his fist closed towards him. It's lean and black and looks like it could be a torch, or perhaps a stick of dynamite. "Will you help me convince him?"

Nika hesitates, then nods helplessly.

The man smiles. "Wonderful." He turns his fist up towards her, his thumb capping the top of the black stick. It's not dynamite. It's a trigger. "I've activated the explosives lined in your jacket. Ah no no, best not to do that - the zipper's wired to the explosives, and might be a little touch sensitive. I wouldn't move too much either, if I were you." He adjusts her collar fussily, drinking in her frozen terror. "I'll deactivate the whole thing once I'm sure 47 is, aha _ha_ , on board with the program and not likely to put a bullet in my head any time soon. I'll send you a text!" he says brightly. He moves to the door and pauses just halfway out. "It was so lovely meeting you at last, Nika Boronina. I'll be seeing you again. And remember," his smile drops abruptly, " _don't_  move."

He disappears, and doesn't close the door behind him.

Nika takes a breath. Then she exhales it shakily and forces herself to breathe again, because it seems pure terror is paralyzing enough to make even breathing forgettable. On the other hand, her heart seems to be trying to trigger the fucking  _touch sensitive_ bombs wrapped around her in the way it is slamming itself against her ribs. The speed of the night's madness is dizzying.  _But 47 is coming back for her_. She doesn't know that. That fucking psychopath had seemed confident though - at least confident enough to bet both their lives that 47 would prefer her alive more than 47 would prefer him dead, oh god. Maybe she should have explained to that fucker that she just had a fight with 47 barely a few hours ago. That 47 moved in and out of emotion the same way other men moved in and out of kinks, and the latest kink was indifference.

Nika breathes, breathes, shallow and quick. She tries to remember what she had fought with 47 about. She can only remember that he barely looked at her, and he had told her to go. Then Nika looks out the window.

The fucking psychopath is out there.

He is moving slowly across the thin stretch of platform in the window, one arm close to his side with a gun and the other holding the trigger ahead of him, almost as if an offering. He is out there, and he is _talking to someone_ , and he is smiling.

The train starts to rumble around her. "No!" Nika stops herself from standing in time. She strains to see more, but if 47 is there, he is out of the frame, she can't see him. Through the smudged window, she sees Smith raise the gun. Nika stops breathing. Then Smith lowers the gun again and says something to that unseen participant. The train is starting to move, slow and groaning. The length of platform in the window starts to edge pass. Nika watches desperately, but there is only more empty platform, more empty space where that unseen participant should have stood, and when she passes Smith, he looks up at her and winks.

The train rattles on, the station falling behind in the window.

And this is…

She feels…

"Nika."

Nika turns her head. And she almost doesn't recognise him for a space of a breath, without his immaculate suit and red tie. But then he is in the cabin; he is on his knees in front of her like some grotesque parody of the man who was just before him; he is examining the zipper of her jacket with that silent, blinding intensity that can only be him. The man named 47.  _He came for her_.

Nika breathes in for what feels like the first time tonight.

She catches his fingers where they are lightly feeling around the jacket for the shape of the explosives. 47 looks up at her. His eyes are so dark they are nearly black, and he is pale in the dim rocking light. His fingers close around hers, too tight to be comforting. It anchors something in her. He is in a blue medic jacket like her, and if it was only yesterday, she would have read the hard, unforgiving line of his shoulders as irritation; she would have seen the tightness of his jaw as anger. Nika knows better now. "You're going to be fine," 47 tells her, quiet as a promise. She thinks she can feel his heart beating through the pads of his fingers, rapid and hard. Oh, she knows.

The phone beeps beside her; they both startle. 47 takes it and reads it, then shows it to her, wordless.

 _Your cooperation has been greatly appreciated_ , the text says.  _Until next time…_

"He said that means-" Nika starts unsteadily, but 47 is already working the zipper of her jacket down slowly, feeding the wire looped through it in careful inches. The jacket unzips fully without any surprises. They both take a moment to release their breath. Then 47 helps her slowly disentangle her good arm from the sleeve without disturbing the flat black packages neatly sewn inside the jacket. He lifts the jacket off her when she's out and leaves the cabin as swiftly and abruptly as he came in.

Nika stands instinctively to follow. Then she stops and stands uselessly in the cabin, stumbling a little with the swaying of the train and the numb aftermath of shock. She is tacky with sweat and dried blood and boneless, sheer relief. One of her hands keep shaking. Her other arm still feels mostly dead from the local, as if a stranger's arm weighted to her body.

47 comes back and his hands are empty. He guides her back down on the seat. "Are you hurt?" he says. Nika shakes her head, despite the deep maroon staining the bandage across her shoulder. She tries to catch his hands in hers again, but 47 pushes her hands away, continues his swift inspection of her shoulder, her scalp and ears, pulling open her half-unbuttoned shirt to inspect her ribs with brief, unsympathetic touches. It's over quickly enough, before she can gather herself enough to adjust to the clinical invasion; then 47 is straightening up over her again and moving to sit across her.

He looks exhausted. There are shadows under his eyes, soft as bruises. She has seen him come back with a shirt sprayed with other men's blood and ash burning holes in his sleeves. She has seen him come back cut up and more battered for the wear, but somehow he had always wore even his cuts like a warning, as if he moved untouched and even more deadly for the violence he had lived through. She has never seen 47 look anything less than perfectly controlled before.

"We need to leave at the next station," 47 says. He opens his mouth like he's going to say something else, then he stops and rubs one tired hand over his face. His eyes are still so dark in his face, but he doesn't look angry, or afraid anymore. He doesn't look like anything, just drained. "I'll find you some clothes from the other passengers just before the train stops."

"Thank you," Nika says faintly.

They sit and stare at each other.

There is a lightness starting to spread in her, whispering and steady. It feels too fragile for a smile, too huge to be framed. The mad chaos of the night had only allowed broken bits to be absorbed before, shotgun style. Now pieces of the last couple of hours are starting to fit back into Nika's head again. She thinks of that fucking psychopath Smith, the cool amusement of his smile and the way he had raised his gun on the platform. Making a point.  _I could kill you, this is how easy it would be._  She has had owners like him before. 47 would have had to be disarmed and open for even that psychopath to dare anything like that; 47 must have disarmed himself, Nika realises with sudden, sickening clarity. She imagines him seeing the trigger in the fucker's hand, and going slow and cold the way he does before the violence erupts. She imagines Smith laughing  _just a little insurance_  and  _one wrong move_  and all that bullshit, imagines 47 dropping his guns, showing his bare palms. An offering for an offering. If someone had stopped the story here, Nika would have shrugged and put her money on: a sudden twist, a hidden gun or dagger under 47's sleeve, perhaps the rail station going up on flames or some other equally dramatic destruction. 47 disappearing into the shadows as the only person unscathed, as always.

Except that didn't happen this time. Smith had smiled and toyed with 47 and watched him go the way a cat lets a mouse go when it knows where the mousehole is. 47 had got on the train and found her strapped with explosives and grey with terror. He held her hand and told her she was going to be fine, and then they had both waited to see if that had been a lie. He had  _stayed_ with her.

Nika still doesn't understand everything that's happened tonight. But she thinks she understands the big points.

Such as: 47's world is a fucking bloodbath, and somehow he's managed to keep her out of it until tonight even though apparently she plays some role in it.

Such as: that fucking psychopath Smith is going to be a problem, but he got them out of something tonight, if only to collect future favours. She can probably breathe a little easier, at least for the rest of tonight.

And after the last hour, such as… Something she can't quite say yet. Can't quite believe. It is a lightness in her throat and in the tips of her fingers. A warmth curled under her ribs, growing like a small sun. It hurts in a good way, the best way: a happiness that hurts. She had forgotten how it felt like. It has only ever happened to her twice before, after all - in a street in Omsk, nearly a year ago, when she opened a white envelope and saw her most hopeless, fragile dream caught in the deed in her hands. And then again three months later, when she glanced up from the deck of her house and saw a dead man making his way to her through her fields, dark eyed and steady. That red slash of his tie like a candle, calling those who play with fire.

And now here it is again, the third time. This sweet ache that burns behind her eyes, insistent and wet. A growing certainty like a warm coin in her mouth. It is three more times than she ever expected from this life.

47 is staring blankly out the window, as if rerunning the night in his head. It's okay, she can barely believe tonight herself. Nika tries to catch his eyes. Then she thinks  _fuck it_ , and stands and crosses the small shaking space between them. She pushes 47 back with one hand on his chest. She straddles him, her knees pressed against the itchy seat backing. She cups the back of his neck with her good hand and then she's kissing him, closed-mouth and fierce.

47 comes back to life and shoves her backwards, hard. She would have probably fallen off too, if he hadn't also grabbed by her hip almost at the same time and pulled her back. Nika lurches back, her forehead knocking into the 47's, fingernails scrabbling at his jacket. She steadies herself with her hand on 47's shoulder. Huffs a ragged laugh. "Sorry," she says. She's not sorry at all. The lightness is giddy in her veins. It makes her feel slightly drunk. A laugh keeps trying to spill out and she shifts back in, feeling him tense under her. "I shouldn't have, I know. Not now. It's just that - I wasn't sure you would come for me. I didn't think you would." 47 is staring at her, as open as she's ever seen him, eyes wide and disbelieving. She sobers up. "But you're here now," she says, softer.

It must be the wrong thing to say. 47's face closes up. He draws his hand back from her hip. "It doesn't -" he starts flatly, but then has to stop again because she's put her hand over his mouth.

"Don't," Nika says. She tries to smile. It probably comes out wrong. "Not tonight. Please. I didn't mean I didn't have faith in you. I do. I do." She can feel him breathing under her fingers, warm and unsteady. "I'm always saying the wrong things. Thinking the wrong things. I fuck up, I know. But it's just that, what I meant was - I've been afraid you were going to leave me, lately. That's all. That's why I thought you wouldn't come."

She can feel him swallow, see his throat moving with it. He doesn't pull her hand away. It opens something in her. There are words rising in her like a wave slow and building for a long time now. Moving to shore.

Nika leans in slowly, until their foreheads are almost touching. 47 goes still under her hand. It's the closest she's been to him in months. It makes her greedy for more. It makes her brave. "You stopped visiting so much," Nika says, quiet. A confession. "You stopped talking to me. And I know you've been busy. I know you aren't like my other - I'm not used to this, being left alone. I used to think that was all I wanted. But you gave me a vineyard and you showed me how to run if I needed to, and the whole time I'd just be waiting for you to join me." 47's throat moves again, but he stays silent. "I know I can't keep up with you. I know that's why you leave me behind. But don't, just  _don't_  pretend you don't care. You came for me tonight. You  _stayed_  with me. Despite - everything. Despite the fucking explosives. That means something, doesn't it?" She waits, then lets her hand fall. 47 is silent, frozen and opaque as a dark pond. Nika's gut drops unpleasantly. "Doesn't it?" Her voice comes out small.

47 doesn't say anything for a long heartbeat. The carriage rocks them closer, apart, closer.

Then, a gentle pressure by her hip: 47 holding her again. Then, a rough warmth by her cheek: 47 cupping her face.

His thumb strokes her cheekbone slowly, where her dragon is. It's important to him, the way she marked herself so long ago; she has never asked why. It is enough to see the way he looks at her - the same way she must have looked when she saw the gorgeous Istanbul skyline for the first time or the dancing light on the blue mediterranean sea. All the wonders she had read about in magazines that she had never quite believed existed. It warms her now, his wondering intensity. It makes her lean into his palm like her vines pressing up to the sun, shameless and needy. She threads her fingers over his and holds it there. She can't stop smiling and her cheeks are wet but really, that's par on course for how this is, this happiness that hurts.

"The real problem here," 47 says, so low she can barely hear him, "isn't you."

Nika laughs a sob. "What was that?"

"Something I keep forgetting." He wipes her wet cheeks gently with his thumb. He looks at her tears and at her tattoo and at her mouth as if reading the future in them, his personal constellation. He meets her eyes and he is not quite smiling, but he is not quite not either. It is a shadow of her kiss at the edge of his mouth, a brightness in the dark light of his eyes. Something too fragile for a smile, too huge to be framed. She thinks she recognises it.

"You didn't want me to stop visiting you," 47 says suddenly.

Nika clutches reflexively at his fingers, confused. "What? No."

"You thought I was going to leave you," 47 continues, calm as the tide. Barely a ripple of the currents underneath.

Nika nods in relief. "Yes. Yes. I told you-"

"This is why you've been… different."

Her heart sinks abruptly like a line pulled underwater. "Yes. I know, I fucked up. I'm sorry."

47 says nothing. He is looking at her as if really seeing her for the first time. Oh. And she's not wearing any make up and she looks like a fucking mess and -

"But I can change, I can be anything, you just have to tell me-"

" _Don't_ ," 47 says, and pulls her head down.

When 47 had kissed her, four months and a lifetime ago, he had hesitated even during it. He had been almost shy in his hunger. He had held her close and she had felt him wanting her and not wanting to want her almost just as badly; she had forced his mouth open with hers, insistent, and tried not to care.

There is no hesitation this time. This time, he brings her down and doesn't let go. 47 smells like smoke and tastes like blood, coppery and harsh in her mouth. He is tongue and teeth and opens her up like he means to bruise, to swallow her breaths and leave his own mark on her like a secret exposed. If he was any other man, there would be a sharp note of fear in her spine now from his edge of desperation. From his hand rough in her hair and the other aggressive in the splay across her naked waist, her shirt racked up between them. But he is not any other man. 47 kisses her hard and messy like a swimmer gasping in air after too deep a dive, too long a swim; and it is all Nika can do to clutch back and give, give, give.

It is over as dizzyingly quick as it starts.

Their foreheads are still touching. 47's hand is still in her hair, keeping her close. They breathe together for a moment like this, too close for her to really see 47's expression. Nika has to lean down from straddling over him to keep them them together. She wonders, dimly, whether she should get off before this ruins it. She knows that 47 hates being trapped.

Then 47 drops his head down. By her cheek, to her chin. Until his forehead is resting against the crook between her shoulder and neck that is nearly level with him. As if his head was too heavy to hold up any longer. As if the strain of waiting for this moment was too much, and he just needed to brace himself against her, just for a moment. His breath is warm against her collarbones. 47's shoulders drop and he breathes out, the tension leaving him in one shuddering release. The tremor that runs through him is as fine as a distant earthquake, as devastating.

It takes a few moments before Nika can gather enough pieces of herself to move again. She leans in ever so slightly; she curves her body to his. She places a hand light on his back, letting him in without closing in. She is only shaking a little. 47 doesn't move, just breathes her in, deep and tired as an old house settling. His hands have slipped down, loose around her hips. After a while, Nika realises with a distant shock that he has actually fallen asleep.

Oh, Nika thinks.  _Oh._ The carriage rocks around them, the movement rattling through the thin seats and her knees pressed against the backing, swaying them both. But 47 sleeps on, his exhaustion finally stripping him bare and more vulnerable than she's ever seen him. Than she ever knew he could be. And it is only a small thing, the simplest thing really, shared by children and assassins alike. The most natural fall in the world: into sleep. All it requires is trust. Nika doesn't know how many more times her heart can break tonight.

Nika stays still, the way she always does when men sleep by her. 47 is a heavy warmth against her, the edge of his ear just brushing by her jaw. They stay like this for half an hour, maybe more. A dull pain starts to remember itself in Nika's wounded shoulder. It doesn't matter. She's so happy. She would stay still for three hours, five, seven, if it meant it would seal this memory perfect and deep in her. Compact it like a leaf carefully pressed in a book that she can take out in the gradual winter of 47's indifference again. No, not indifference: preoccupation. She knows better now. 47 will lose himself in his work, the way he always does, and when that happens, Nika won't be defenceless this time. She will retrace the raw veins of tonight, hold on to its bittersweet tenderness. She will turn this fragile memory in her hand over and over again until it is stained and achingly fresh on her fingers. She will remember, and then they will get through it, one way or another. She won't be afraid again.

The landscape outside the window starts to change, becoming flatter under the moonlight. Distant pinpoint of lights start to appear in lonely ones. Then twos. When they start to appear in little handfuls, Nika starts to move again, reluctant. She rubs 47's back gently. He wakes as instantly as he fell asleep, straightening up in the moment of a drawn breath.

"I think we're going to stop soon," she tells him. 47 glances out the window and looks blank; Nika realises no time has passed at all for him. "You slept at little," she prompts. She tries on a smile, small and probably a little too shy to be teasing, "I kept watch."

47 blinks, blinks; then seems to come back into himself. "I see." He doesn't smile, but his tone is not unkind. He looks down at his hands cupping her hips, looks up at her watching him anxiously. He moves his hands away from her.

Nika gets the message: she eases herself off him awkwardly and down next to him. Her wounded shoulder throbs warningly. 47 rubs his face with one hand and stands, swaying with the train. He seems to be coming back more and more into himself as he wakes. Nika tells herself it's a good thing. 47 moves to the window to look out fully, probably to count the number of pinpoint lights or calculate the angle of the moon, or whatever the fuck that tells him more about where they are then she would probably be able to if he gave her a compass and a map. When he turns back, he still looks tired, but the black wildness that has been in his eyes for most of the night is gone. They are calm as dark water again.

 _A good thing_ , Nika reminds herself. 47 stands over her and steadies himself against the cabin's rocking with one hand on the upper baggage railings. She smiles hesitantly up at him. The rumbling of the train starts to slow, very gradually.

"When we get off, I will find us a car. We will need to move quickly," 47 says. He nods at her shoulder, weary. "It may take a few hours before we can find a doctor to look at your injury."

"That's okay."

"We will need to keep moving for at least a week. Likely more."

"Okay."

"If anyone asks when you return to the vineyard, you were in a car accident. A broken steel rod punctured your shoulder just below the clavicle. Pay attention to anyone who asks too many questions."

 _Oh_. "Okay," Nika says again, trying not to let her disappointment show. Her vineyard is her home - of course she shouldn't be disappointed to be deposited back there. She glances across the seat where the black phone still lies, ordinary and menacing. "What happens when that - when  _he_ calls?"

47's jaw tightens briefly. "I'll deal with 53 alone." He moves to pocket the phone. "You'll never see him again."

 _53._ So she was right about that fucker. "He said his name was Jonathan Smith," she says slowly. "But he came from the same place as you, didn't he?" 47 comes back to stand in front of her, says nothing. Nika presses on, bits of that bastard's spiel coming back to her: "He talked about - about people finding me. About agencies. Is he an agent?"

"No," 47 says shortly.

"Then-"

"He was," 47 says. "I made a mistake. I didn't think it was relevant who else had survived the - who else had quit before. I will not underestimate him again."

His tone made it clear that this line of conversation was over. 47 is looking down at her expressionlessly, in that flat way tells Nika he's gone cold with fury inside. But not at her, she thinks. She swallows the rest of the questions crowding her mouth anyway, such as  _you knew each other, didn't you_  and  _what does he want, why did he let us go_  and  _he said he saved my life_. The last one: not a question. A man like that fucker would have told 47 exactly how, mocked him about it. The fact that 47 has kept the phone answers that question for her. What was that look on that bastard's face, on the platform?  _I could kill you, this is how easy it would be_. Or, put another way:  _I own you now_.  _You owe me._  Nika may not fully understand 47's world but she once lived in the fringes of it, from the other side that looks down that black hole of the gun muzzle. She understands this. She could have tried to run from Bellicoff every day but she never did, not after the first time. You never stop running, and one day, when you're walking down an alley or crawling into the first grungy bed you've managed to afford in days, you turn and there's someone else in the room.

47 isn't the kind of man who'd run. It makes her lightheaded to think what he might be fighting for.

"I didn't know you could quit," Nika says instead. She tries a smile again, to ease the tension, "I can't imagine that bastard in a suit. He isn't like you at all." She thinks that was the point of that fucker's whole erratic, theatrical act. And she thought the places that she grew up in fucked  _her_ up.

47 doesn't smile back, but she thinks the hard line of his mouth loosens a little. He turns his head to the window, where the landscape is only moving by in sluggish chugs now. The wheels start to hiss under them. The pinpoints of lights are much closer, the silhouettes of houses taking shape in the darkness.

When 47 looks down at her again, it is an even, assessing look which takes in her maroon stained shoulder, her naked thighs and feet. "You're wearing my shirts again," he says suddenly, without anger. Nika's fingers stumble and stop playing at the edge of her torn shirt. 47 is already moving away before she can think of how to answer. "Get ready to leave. I'll get your clothes."

 _Okay_ , Nika thinks faintly. So this is it, then. This is Prague all over again, after all: where 47 kissed her for the first time and everything changed, but mostly in her head. Where 47 breaks down for one stolen, secret moment to give in to something they both want, and then they both pretend it never happened immediately after. For a moment, she is just watching him walk out the door. Then her body overrules her brain and she's stumbling up, grabbing 47 by the sleeve of his jacket. 47 turns, surprised.

"I could come with you," she says. The words spilling out from somewhere deep inside her, urgent and unstoppable. It's been hidden in the damp earth of her vineyard, itching in her fingernails whenever he surprised her with a visit. It's been lying quiet in the hush at the top of her hill, whenever she sits before a sky as bare as joy and still only ever watches that small, dusty road in the distance. Waiting. Well, she won't just wait anymore. She's sick of pretending. "I could come with you, or I could stay in a places closer to wherever you are, I don't mind where." 47 turns to her fully, stepping back into the cabin. "It's just that I know you'd get busy again, and then you won't be able to come visit. Not often anyway, and you never stay long." She's babbling. She pushes on. "But if you took me with you-"

"I am."

Nika pauses. 47 is watching her closely. "I meant," she manages, "I mean for more than a week. I mean I don't want you to leave me-"

"You only have to return to your vineyard," 47 says, "when you wish to. And I will be able to stay for much longer from now on."

Nika's mouth opens, closes. 47 is watching her steadily, as if he had not just reversed the world in the space of a skipped heartbeat. But it is not indifference: he is watching her too closely for that; his hands twitch as if stopping from reaching out to her. He hesitates in her stunned silence, then says carefully, with a gentleness she hasn't heard since she first confessed her dream of a vineyard to him, a lifetime ago, "I think that we should probably talk more."

"Yes," Nika says dazedly. Then: " _Yes._ "

The brakes of the train are shuddering under them now. She's probably ruining 47's plans of getting her a new outfit. She should probably let him go now. But it's hard to care when there is that lightness starting to spread in her again, tremulous as hope. She can feel it rising naked in her face, that desperate kind of joy that embarrasses people and leads them to look away. 47 isn't looking away. For the first time, it occurs to Nika that 47 might just be as sick of waiting as her. That for all that he seems as deliberate and dispassionate as the turning of the earth in everything else, he might just be figuring _this_ out as he goes too, and doing it as badly as her.

Maybe this isn't Prague after all.

Nika pulls herself together. "I won't get in your way," she promises. She moves closer to 47, close enough that he usually steps away. He doesn't. She puts her hand on his chest and it is warm beneath her palm: he is really here with her. "I won't interfere with your work at all." She can feel him breathe out under her palm, as if he had been tense before.

"It'll be a new experience for both of us," 47 says mildly.

"I'll try to do what you say," she insists. She probably looks drunk and stupid with her smile; she can't stop.

"Trying would be helpful."

"We will probably argue all the time," Nika admits, because it turns out she's too honest when she's this happy, this in love. She isn't even worried. 47 is not-smiling that smile that hides behind his eyes again, and his hands have found themselves on her waist without her putting them there. He's not stepping away: he's leaning in. Around them, the train has finally staggered to a hissing stop, bringing the muted sounds of people starting to get off.

"Good," 47 says, soft. But she hears him. There could be no one in this train but them. "I'll look forward to finally winning an argument one day."

Nika breathes out, and 47 breathes in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks for all feedback!


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